I am now a high school teacher. One of the banes of classroom disciplie is the cell phone. The students won’t take a direct order to turn them off, and they’re constantly ringing with some song sample or a Nextel W/T chirp.
(The school board, in its infinite wisdom, has deemed that they have the right to carry them in school, but not to have them on. Totally useless rule.)
Now, the damn things can sample voices and songs, then play them back at annoying decibel levels. They take video pics that can be shown over and over.
It seems that every day I hear about some new feature coming out on some phone. ENOUGH ALREADY! Cell phone companies: we teachers don’t need any more competition in keeping our students’ attention. Please, keep phones as simple as possible.
“Cell phones are allowed in school but you are not allowed to have them on. If you are currently carrying a cell phone, please check NOW to see if your cell phone is on, and, if so, turn it off. If, during the course of this class, your phone rings, you will be counted as cutting today’s class.”
If they ring in my class, I answer them. It allows me a tremendous amount of…venting at whoever is at the other end. In 5 years of cell phones, I have never had a parent on the other end.
This is the best solution. Teens need embarrassment in front of their peers to listen. Not all of them, but the ones who wish to pay attention I’m sure appreciate your actions.
Interesting thought, but I wonder if you could expand on it some. Is the idea that people won’t call if the person that they are calling is deeply engaged in doing something interesting? If that is the case, I wonder why this has failed to work with telemarketers. Or were you just being contrary for its own sake?
Nobody leaves a phone on if they THEMSELVES would be disturbed if it rang, you only forget if it would disturb others. But yeah, kicking them out would work better.
Right. That explains why people attending conferences for which they paid good money leave cellphones on if they’re not reminded before each session.
I like silenus’s idea myself. Why annoy the parents - they can’t force the dope to turn the phone off. Having phones in school is a good idea, in case of problems. When there was a lockdown in my daughter’s high school, the illegal cellphones came out, which no doubt relieved parents when the kids were late getting home. (To the credit of the school, no one got adminished for carrying one.)
Teaching the kids to turn the phone off now will reduce the number of rude stares they get in concerts, movies and at the theater throughout their lives.
It’s not totally useless. When I was a wee sprout, I was a latchkey kid with a lot of extra-cirriculars. My family needed some way to get a hold of me, so they bought me a pager. It was the dark ages, and of course my pager was banned from campus. Every day I had to go check it in to the office, and then go and check it out again after school. It wasn’t until high school that I realized nobody was going to know the difference and just kept it on me.
Anyway, thank goodness kids don’t have to go through that dumb crap anymore.
Teachers at my high school had a number of ways to deal with cell phones. If we were writing a test or quiz and someone’s cell phone made any noise at all, they’d get zero on the test. When it came to cell phones ringing during regular class, one of my teachers would remove 1% from the student’s grade, one teacher would answer the phone and chew out whoever was on the other end, and one teacher would force the student to come up to the front of the class and sing, in full, whatever song the ringtone was. Especially funny when it was some twink who had to rap some ghetto hip-hop.
Sure. We managed without them outside of school also, but when some clown rearended my daughter (her car, actually ) it was nice she could call so she didn’t have to deal with it alone.
The cellphone/pager ban in California was established when it was thought that only pushers and pimps would have one. It is good they can eliminate out of date laws in less than a century and without the state becoming a laughingstock.
AWB, somewhere in your school is a teacher not having the same problem, or at least to this degree. Find that person and ask how they’ve dealt with it successfully.
Then, take a walk to your principal’s office and explain the problem and ask for some back-up when you enforce the policy that says student’s phones can’t be on during the day.
Set to silent and do txt message where the teacher can’t see.
These kids are not even trying…
Set to silent and call all missed calls between classes?
These kids are not even trying…
Any kid too dumb to go silent on the cell phone in classes where they know the penalties either need tougher penalties or need to quit school because they are not able to learn anyway.
