― Saul Bellow, Seize the Day
As a high school teacher, cell phones are the enemy. I enjoy the hunt. Seriously, though…I love my phone, but I put
it away while I’m teaching. As soon as
class as over, I look forward to checking in to see if there’s anything new,
just like my students.
I warn students on the first day of school. I don’t have very many rules, but keeping the
cell phone put away from bell to bell is pretty much the one I enforce. I warn them—it’s a power trip for me to take
their phone away. I go into the
philosophy behind my rule—I want them to learn, and value the people around
them. There’s less and less face to face
interaction, and my class is a place that I want to encourage social
etiquette. Still, it happens almost
every day. Sometimes I sneak up on my
prey, and take the phone away, and other times I make a run for it, being loud
and obnoxious but, almost every time, there’s a sense of surprise on the
student’s face when I reach in for it.
Today was an interesting score. It was a girl using the purse block
technique. Her purse was on top of the
desk, as a shield, with the phone propped inside or behind it. She willingly handed over the phone. The school rule is that I turn it into the
office. If it’s the first time in my
class, though, I ignore the school rule and keep it for the duration of the
day. It was her first offense all year,
so I told her she could have it back at the end of the day. Of course there was an excuse and a protest,
but I ignored her. At the end of each
period we have a tutorial built in to help students who are not passing, or
need help. She stayed back and mumbled
about why she needed her phone. I took
pity, and told her she could have the phone after the bell rang, briefly, to
retrieve her mom’s cell phone number or shoot a quick text. She stood, frozen, at my desk for the next
ten minutes. It was weird. I told her to go sit down and relax, but she
couldn’t. The girl was having a melt
down without her phone.
There have been some studies done recently among college
students. They asked students to give up
their cell phones for 24 hours and log their feelings. Many students recorded feelings of panic and
loss. Many spoke of having anxiety and
twitching, even, similar to a caffeine or drug addiction. Today I saw this behavior in my student.
I worry about this generation. Their phones seem to hold the answers to
almost everything they need. The phone
validates their existence, and Google seems to hold the answer to any question
that comes up. It’s pretty cool that we
can find the answers to so many questions, but sometimes questions don’t have
an answer, or there are several solutions aside from the one that comes up on
the Internet. My student couldn’t figure
out what to do about not being able to contact her mom, or so she said. I gave her a couple of suggestions—write the
number down and use a friend’s phone, text from a friend’s phone, or go to the
office and call her mom. Nothing was
acceptable except taking back her phone.
I made her live without it for the rest of the day. I’m sure there was something more to the
freak out. I’ve found some interesting
things on my cell phone acquisitions; accidentally hitting buttons can expose
things. I do not search their phones for
this reason. I’m not out to get them. I’d rather respect my student’s space. Still, I’m concerned that kids are losing the
ability to function face to face. Almost
everything can be done through planned communication. What’s happening to organic, spontaneous
conversation? I’m sure that my parents
were worried about what the computer could mean, and their parents worried
about the television.
Regardless, I’m still going to try to push my students to be
present in the moment, rather than in two places at once.
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