Extra, Extra
Extra, Extra
Extra, Extra
Extra, Extra
Early Addition
City Council members - plus public school students and their parents - are gearing up for a fight with the Mayor over the cell phone ban in public schools. Yesterday, the City Council held a hearing about the ban, eliciting a lot of City Council and public support for removing the ban, while the Bloomberg administration wants to stand firm. In April, the Department of Education started "surprise scans" at all high schools, which allowed security staff to check students bags. The scans are really used to locate weapons, but since cellphones have been banned since 1988, found phones have been confiscated. Some of the comments from the City Council:
- City Councilman Simcha Felder: "The cheating business used to do very very well for many years without cell phones."Of course, that was in the old Stuyvesant days, when kids from Washington Irving High School would harrass Stuy kids walking eastward. Anyway, Deputy Mayor Derek Walcott told the City Council the Mayor would not move away from its policy. Take that from the Bloomberg "311 - it's all about information" Administration!
- City Councilman Peter Vallone: "What we are doing today is ensuring the safety of our kids."
- And our favorite, from City Councilwoman Jessica Lappin: "When I went to Stuyvesant and none of us had cellphones. And people came from neighboring schools and tried to beat us up anyway."
Some students testified that they don't use cellphones during school, but, please, for every kid who says they don't, there's another kid who does - and peer pressure to not use cellphones doesn't seem like it'll work. One student's argument that the scans violated their "right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure, since a turned-off cellphone is not really threatening" is more compelling to us. You can't count the kids out, as they are stashing their cellphones on the way to school as well as downloading "silent" ring tones.
add to digg
add to stumble upon
add to reddit
email this
add to facebook
add to del.icio.us
They don't belong in school. WAY too much of a distraction. I got out of the system right before cell phones started becoming popular and I know for a fact that they will cause nothing but problems. Kids will be kids.
And they wonder, how did kids ever LIVE without cell phones before the year 2000...
before 2000? it was beepers...
Are the white students protesting?
Because, to tell you the truth, all I'm seeing are black and hispanic students protesting AND skipping school for this.
If you have a photo of a GROUP of white students protesting, please provide a linky.
thank you.
test
Ahh yes. The beepers.
I remember when I brought my first beeper. I brought it because everyone else had one. It was $25 for the beeper and $12 a month for the service (With 200 beeps). First day In school I started to strut down the hallways with my new Beeper, wowing the ladies and putting the other guys to shame.
After a month I realized something:
NO ONE FUCKING BEEPED ME, EVER.
Not only did no one beep me, No one ever beeped anyone else who had a god for saken Beeper! And whatever beeps and bops i heard from coming from people playing with the music tones on their beepers.
I got rid of it after a month and a half.
Just use the summer to install cell jammers in the schools and let them keep the useless phones. The jammers could be switched off instantly if there's a true, citywide emergency.
BTW, two more went off to limbo AGAIN. The first just froze forever without submitting. The second about ten minutes later resulted in this message, "In an effort to curb malicious comment posting by abusive users, I've enabled a feature that requires a weblog commenter to wait a short amount of time before being able to post again. Please try to post your comment again in a short while. Thanks for your patience." This might be a useful feature if the stupid software didn't lose messages in the first place. And I notice my complaint about it last night was removed. What's the matter, Jake, don't want people to know your precious blog software update malfunctions repeatedly?
I was there and took video of the students from La Guardia you quoted in your post. Here it is for anyone interested:
Can You Hear Us Now?
Yea, I can't really phantom how such an issue became such a hot potato. If these so called parents get half as indignant and riled up about the poor education that their kids are receiving we would probably be on our way to a better school system but instead we're stymied over such mundane issue as poor little Tommy not being electronically tethered to his mother's teats. Meanwhile classes are held in bathrooms and lunchrooms. We sure know where to set our priorities. I'm pretty much fed up with this whole issue and could care less. For all I care the rugrats can have their blaring cell phones in class and just drop out of school. We'll just outsource the technical jobs or have a bunch of Indians and Chinese on H-1B work visas do the work.
It's not just the cell phones. Sidekicks, PSPs, iPods that are often in the way of what needs to happen in the classroon too. Many of my students won't allow themesleves to be bored long enough to get into serious thinking.
Beleive it or not, most students would rather be using their cell phones, sidekicks, PSPs and iPods than use a wireless laptop to blog, create wikis or upload their own digital images to Flickr.
I wondering if I try podcasting with them next year do I get to cane them if they break out with a PSP when they're supposed to be making comments on a blog?
Springfield Elementary: It's Regents week. The students that were there didn't have school. Only students who have a Regents scheduled are in school this week, and only during the time of the test.
Judas Iscariot: It's fathom, not phantom. I just love people who are so critical of the lack of education of others yet aren't careful with how they present their own academic brilliance.
Mr. Kotter: Do the students get to cane the teachers if they are utter failures in doing their own jobs? Will you give your sanction to such a witty suggestion? Of course some students are terrible at what they do. It would be nice to recognize that not all teachers are stellar at their end of the bargain either.
In sum, our education system has big problems. Most people recognize this and agree on it. When it comes to solutions, students are more often than not the scapegoats instead of the centerpiece of good policy. This cell phone policy is nonsensical. The Councilmembers and students at the hearing were able to articulate perfectly reasonable alternatives that would not be the doomsday scenarios the commenters here are being chicken little over.