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As another glorious school year nears, teachers are hunkering down to do battle against that increasingly implacable classroom foe.
No, not students.
The cellphone.
Like the sneakiest enemy, the phones seldom are seen. They hide in places like sweat shirt pouches, behind upright textbooks or under desktops. They are easily camouflaged.
Usually, they aren’t heard. But every so often, usually because of a tactical mistake, they emit a sound. That can be even more upsetting to the teacher -- imagine what a “Smack That†ringtone can do to a lecture on the Tudor dynasty.
Oh, the stories teachers could tell. I asked one of them to do just that, and he obliged.
Keith Martyn is a good-natured high school history teacher who appreciates a good gag as much as the next high school history teacher.
But when a student in his class got the bright idea to call Martyn’s classroom phone -- while sitting in class -- well, that was not funny.
“I’d say, ‘Hello,’ and he stayed on for a second,†Martyn says. “I’d hear a cough, and I knew it was someone in the classroom. He was able to do it under his desk. I was lucky to catch him. It really infuriated me, and I’m not easily angered.â€
It wasn’t so much that the student was playing teacher for the fool. Teachers know that that sometimes goes with the territory. What bugged Martyn, especially after the fourth call in one class period, was that the disruption meant that students weren’t fully attuned to the day’s lesson. And that the calls went on for a few weeks before he captured the perpetrator.
Martyn is no fuddy-duddy. He’s quick with the joke and likes to tell the story that, after picking up one student’s phone as an incoming call arrived, he pretended to be the student and said to the caller: “You know there are no cellphones in this classroom!†and then simulated smashing the phone to bits. Actually, he merely hit the desk with a stapler, but he got the point across.
A 37-year-old ex-Marine, Martyn wants a certain amount of order in his Tustin High School classroom.
He says Tustin students are “some of the nicest kids I’ve ever dealt with,†so he doesn’t bust their chops too badly on the first offense. He’ll merely take the phone and return it after class. Second offense, he may keep it till the end of the day. By the third time, he’ll consider keeping it all year, but he concedes he doesn’t like to do that.And how extensive is the problem? “If I really wanted to, I could take two a day,†he says. One of his pet peeves is that students from other classes phone his students during class.
The cellphone problem has been growing in recent years, he says. In fact, he first thought it was “cool†that students walked around campus with them. The phones obviously serve a purpose for such logistical situations as parental pickup after school.
But Martyn became much less accommodating a few years ago when he discovered -- after the fact -- that a boy in class had been text-messaging friends to line up a fight off-campus that involved knives.
“That said it right there -- this can never happen again,†Martyn says.
“He was in my classroom, where I was supposed to have control over everything, and he was texting friends to meet him at a Jack in the Box to stab some people.â€
The other problem is that texting obviously raises the cheating opportunities in class. We all remember school days when some students would try to look at someone else’s paper, or the smart kid would pass a note to the less-smart one.
Nowadays, you simply text them with the correct answer. Sort of like the phone-a-friend option from the TV game show.
We are not talking epidemic here. But what strikes me in all this is that it’s just one more thing for teachers to have to worry about.
Such is life, Martyn says.
On the good side, he says, parents would be relieved to know that most of the messages on phones he has confiscated are “usually pretty adorable.â€
And, hey, even calling his classroom phone from the back of the class might have been OK if the caller had been more inventive.
“If it makes you laugh, I have no problem,†he says, chuckling.
Oh, so you’d accept a funny call?
“Absolutely,†he says. “If it’s a really good crank call.â€
Let’s end on that note. Besides, who wants teachers to be in a bad mood right off the bat this fall?
So, this isn’t a problem that teachers will have been stewing about all summer?
Nah, Martyn says. “It’s not something teachers think about until they hear that first ring,†he says. “Then it all comes back.â€
To which he quickly adds: “It’ll be on the first day, too.â€
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Dana Parsons’ column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at [email protected]. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons
