A telling time
Part of my paid life is spent as a fly on the wall, or, as my employer prefers to call it “the technician designated to your meeting”. Whatever. I’m the person that sits in a corner and makes sure that everything you do with technology works, rather than degrading into a session of bad language over yet another failure to respond to your needs.
And, as the designated fly on the wall, I have to listen, attentively (in case someone calls my name, in vain). Which has as a side effect that I absorb all sorts of spurious information. Great fun, if that’s what floats the boat. Plus, the food is free. Usually.
But I should get back to today’s discussion; after all, it was interesting. I’ve been out of the classroom for more than a decade now. In that time, two huge changes in the way students live. The cellphone and social networking. Forget the erasable pens. Schools have a hard time dealing with change from without, believe me. The immediate response has been a blanket ban, on both.
If you ban something, you have to have police action and penalties. Teachers have added the first to their growing list of tasks; the penalties are simple. In fact, there is one. Confiscation. Sometimes you get your life back at the end of the day, or the week, or… And this is where the story gets, shall I say it, intense.
Removing the cell (and by extension, access to social networking) is extreme. Comparable, for some, to ablation of a limb.
Given the extreme sanctions in place, I wondered why a student would risk unholstering that device in the classroom. Number one reason, apparently, is to tell the time. It doesn’t matter that there is an old, traditional, circular clock on the front wall. The student no longer knows how to interpret time in motion.
I’m sorry; I don’t know how to react.
