Please Text During Class

Four score and seven years ago schools were invented in one room school houses. Then no child left behind came along and tried its hardest to ruin education. A year or so later I worked in an elementary school and finally in a high school. On Thursday a student showed me his phone during first period. On his phone was a text message from his guidance counselor stating, “Michael, please see me. And turn off your phone.”

“May I go see my counselor?” asked the student holding his phone up for me to see.

I was stunned. “No. Absolutely not. I’m sorry. That’s not a pass.”

“But she needs to talk to me, probably about this class,” he said.

“Still no. If a counselor needs to see you, they will send for you,” I said. Then I reminded him that his phone should be off and that it should be put away. Our school has a no cell phone policy ever.

He pleaded for me to let him see his counselor. Finally, I emailed the counselor asking if she was in fact the sender of the text. She was. She was caught. The guidance counselor of a high school in a supposedly “good” county was sending a text message to a student during instructional time.

“Yes, the text was from me, but I will be out of the building until one. He should see me after one. And tell him to turn his phone off, like I did in the text.”

That was the day I quit my job. Not really, but I felt like it. The guidance counselors don’t know the battle that we as teachers go through daily with the cell phones. The students feel the need to text under the desks a various points throughout the class time. Forty five minutes can’t pass without the students having to know what’s happening with their friends in the other part of the building.

I’d love let the students know, “We see you texting. Every single time. We just choose to not stop you each and every time because it would take away from the learning of the rest of the students. I promise you can survive without your phone for forty five consecutive minutes, you little idiot.” I would love to break their phone right in front of their face and then sarcastically and as offensively as possible say, “Oops!”

So when a guidance counselor condones this kind of activity by texting a student during my class, I get ticked with a side of violence.