Dreaded are the “phone jails” which loom overhead classrooms this year; the newest way of policing cellphone use, this time wrapped up in a lovely numbered canvas package.
I quite distinctly recall the seniors in freshman year complaining about the intensity of that year’s new phone policy, (which now seems laughably lax in comparison to today’s). New that year was the inclusion of formal outlined punishment for inappropriate phone use, and a school-wide ban of earbud and headphone use unless allowed by teachers that period.
Now, some three years later, teachers in our building are being pushed to put our phones into numbered pouches hanging on the wall. As another preventative measure, teachers are feigned punishment for their student’s misuse of technology, with the looming threat of our administrators patrolling the hallways and sticking their heads through the door’s little glass window.
Grosse Pointe South’s phone-use policy will only continue to get worse. I said as much to my younger sister, a sophomore, the very first week of school in frustration with my senior year’s new cell phone policy.
After I cease to roam these marbled halls, after my younger sisters do as well, the cell phone policy will become increasingly worse and more restrictive.
However unhappy it makes our administration, cell phones, and technology are a reality we must face as a collective society. Just as parents in the 50s demonized rock n’ roll, cell phones and internet usage are now the societal devil in the minds of those above the age of fifty.
The solution to the issue of cell phones is not to stow them away and punish teachers and students alike.
I present to you, humble reader, no solution to the issue of cell phones my seventeen-year-old brain can muster. However, I will say the solution is not to put them into pouches.
Today, cell phones are one of our primary modes of communication, a useful tool, and a gateway into the outside world. Instead of being restricted, cell phones should be utilized and healthy habits should be instilled instead. Simply stripping away a problem is not helpful to developing minds. Instituting the use of cell phones as tools rather than something to be demonized is more beneficial to our education, and more sympathetic to our increasing maturity as teenagers.
