Not even close.
More than once in the past week, I've made plans with students to meet outside of their regular class time, during lunch, before or after school, stuff like that. Each time, I ask her/him to be responsible, and make sure that s/he keeps the time, and each time s/he has responded, "Okay. I'll put an alarm in my phone." 21st century, huh?
When I was in high school, eons ago, cell phones were a HUGE hell-no. They're still against the rules, but I see a lot of kids using them in school for things that adults use their phones for, too. Remembering appointments. Keeping to-do lists.
The other day, there was a massive field trip; a fourth of the student body was in St. Louis checking out some biology-related exhibit. I heard two teachers remarking in the hall that they knew things were going well and that the students were having fun because they had been calling their friends in school to tell them about it. Both teachers commented that even though they knew the kids weren't supposed to be using their phones in school, it was kinda nice to know how everything was going.
I wonder if the cell phone rule will let up anytime in the near future?
2 comments:
I think it will. I think teachers are tired of policing their students for cell phone infractions in schools, interrupting their classes every twenty minutes because someone has a cell phone. It was different back when cell phones were a novelty and caused a major disruption, but now everyone has one and people take them everywhere.
Besides, get real! When cell phones became ubiquitous at my high school, they removed the public pay phones from around the school. I wanted to be like "UM, some of us don't HAVE these things!" because I didn't have a cell phone and when emergencies arose, there was no longer the pay phones I relied on to make calls home. Sometimes I got a friend to let me use their phone, other times I was stranded. If you prevent students from bringing their cells to school yet don't want to let them use the office phones in an emergency, they're just going to hide them.
yeah, the cell phone thing really doesn't bother me while i'm teaching any more than any other off-task behaviors. i think you make a good point when you say that the novelty has worn off.
as for the not-everyone-has-one thing, that's something i've been needing to give a lot of thought to as far as assigning work on our class' online forum. i can't very well penalize students who don't have internet access, or a computer(or, therefore, computer skills), but i also don't have access as often as i'd like to school computer labs during class time. some of my kids don't know how to google search! what kind of literacy educator am i if i don't give them opportunities to practice computer literacy skills?
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