Listening to the oldies station recently, I picked up on an interesting line in the song “If You Want My Body, and You Think I’m Sexy” a classic Rod Stewart song. The line went, “Give me a dime, so I can phone my mother.” It made me chuckle. How many younger people these days would even understand that line? How old does one have to be to remember public pay telephones that only cost a dime?
The other part that made me laugh was the fact that a boy was going to call his mother before he spent the night with a woman. Who does that? And how would that conversation go? “Uh, Mom, yeah. I’m going home with this chick because she wants my body and thinks I’m sexy, uh, so don’t wait up.” Is such a call a courteous custom that people practiced 30 years ago? I’m sure these days it would be a text.
Speaking of which, just recently in the school where I teach we have decided to grant students more freedom to text, as if they didn’t already have it. Now they are allowed to text at lunch and between classes. So really it means that now we don’t have to enforce those rules that no one was enforcing anyway. The idea is that granting them such a privilege will make it less likely that they will be texting during forbidden times (during classes) or in forbidden places (like the bathrooms and locker rooms – the worry here is about phones that take photos).
The student council was given the job of presenting this new privilege to the student body, and they made fancy posters urging students not to abuse it and warning them that if they did, their fellow students could turn them in by “anonymous email” to a teacher. Huh? Wait a minute! Something’s not right there. How does one send an anonymous email? And even if there were a way, a teacher taking the word of an anonymous someone as proof is worse than taking the word of the class tattle tale. The other part of the poster that most students will see right through is the fact that the consequences for abusing this privilege are basically the same as they were before with the added consequence of having to serve a detention with the teacher in whose class the cell phone was used. Yeah right! I’m going to serve detention based on an anonymous email tip!?! I guess the student council is either pretty clueless or freaking brilliant, depending on how you look at it.
Well, I hate to sound grumpy, old, and out of touch, but were we just as stupid and devious when we were kids? Maybe we were, but at least we had manners and would call our parents on those dime public pay phones if we weren’t coming home, and they were rotary dial phones too! Let’s see the younger generation try texting with one of those! They may come to understand the hardships of our youth, and how we walked uphill to school both ways…sigh…it’s hard getting old.
Let's welcome a new contributor for our first post of the new year. This article is courtesy of AJWanty!
Right on! When I went to school 95% of kids went to school every day. We didn't have trips to New Orleans, New York, or Mexico during the school year. We had one field trip my senior year, to Norhern Colony, in Chipwea Falls to visit special needs individuals. Students didn't get A's and B's when they did little to nothing in the classroom. Weird times back then.
ReplyDeleteSports were after school, not before, during, and on weekends. No need fot cell phones and texting under those condition. Thanks for the article.