Friday's thoughts

I’m convinced (but then again, what do I know, I’m just a teacher who sees approximately 76 kids in class every single day and hundreds more in the hallway) that the only way to remedy the cell phone nuisance, like Red Lake Falls or Grand Forks Central handle it, is to immediately offer a verbal warning. Then when we see the phone again, we take it. The only way they can get it back is when a parent personally comes in and gets the phone.

Sure, that’s easy for RLF to enforce, they have a fraction of the students. But we have a fraction of the students that GF has, so we can’t use the old “we are too big to handle the issue like some small schools do.”

If we don’t have the policy, kids will text all day long.

I’ve come to the end of my rope. If we listen to a chapter of TKM and I look up, I’ll see half a dozen students staring at their crotches. It’s not that they’re fascinated with themselves; they’re just eyeing their cell phones cradled in their laps.

Now I suppose if we are going to allow them, we should make them part of class – have students send in their assignments via text and so forth.

I talk to my neighbor who teaches science in RLF, and I’m absolutely envious of how they handle the cell phone issue. I asked him what his classroom policy was on it. He said, “I don’t have one. Our school has the policy.”

How nice would that be?