Lesson learned for an '80s baby: The traumatic reason students need cell phones
Lesson learned for an '80s baby: The traumatic reason students need cell phones
'CNN's One Thing' was a startling reminder of how much mass shootings in schools have increased
Last week, I had jury duty. And before I could go in the waiting area, I had to fill out my jury duty notice and hand it over to one of the court employees to receive my panel number and juror number. I could easily recall the last time I had jury duty and served on a jury. Contact information and employers was no problem. But I had to scratch out my age three times because I kept forgetting how old I was.
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Finally, I pulled out my phone and did the math. It is so weird to be at an age where the birthdays just start running together. After I turned 30, the rest went by in a blur. The only thing that kept me on track was my five-year trips to Hawaii — until COVID-19 happened in 2020 and then the Lahaina tragedy three years later.
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I definitely don’t want to be younger than I am, and I’ve never been the type to reminisce about my glory days in high school. (I have zero interest in going to a high school reunion.) However, I had a great time at my second college (an HBCU), and I enjoyed grad school. Still, it’s not something I’d want to do again — even though I have a blast at every single homecoming I attend.
As an ‘80s baby, there are some things I just take for granted and think is the “norm” — until I realize it’s not. Today, I listened to “CNN’s One Thing” podcast episode entitled “No Phones In Class. It’s the Law Here Now” and rolled my eyes to the sky while hearing teenagers losing their minds about not being able to have their cell phones and ear pods in class.
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I listened to (what I viewed as) melodramatic story after story about “what if there’s an emergency” and complaints about how they wouldn’t be able to listen to music while working. Even the diabetes story didn’t sway me, especially considering the unfortunate number of people I know who have diabetes who will barely answer a text as adults. But the complaints about music were what really made me smack my lips.
I was appalled. I didn’t get to choose my favorite songs to listen to in class. I know some people do better working in silence versus those who need noise, but the way they were talking was like a classroom was their personal office — and the water cooler where they can chitchat. (I got in more than enough trouble writing on sheets of paper and asking classmates to pass it down to a friend.)
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As much as I talked in class, it would’ve been chaos and consistent failing grades if I could spend the entire class texting away to somebody on the other side of the room. The idea of banning cell phones in a classroom when we’ve had centuries of no phones in class seemed obvious to me.
That is — until one student spoke up about how she wouldn’t be able to tell her parent if there was a school shooting. My head snapped back. Even during the worst gang fights near my school, the last thing on my mind was ever a mass shooting.
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CNN One Thing
(Click the image to play the episode)
But this year alone, there have been 407 mass shootings across the U.S. and 50 school shootings so far, according to the Gun Violence Archive and CNN. Last year, there were 656 mass shootings and 82 school shootings. But when I graduated from high school in 1999, the total number of school shootings was 18. While I was making snarky comments about entitled teenagers, it had not occurred to me that the “emergencies” they were talking about was a legitimate complaint.
Even with the increased number of school shootings, several states have cell phone bans and restrictions, including California, Delaware, Indiana, Louisiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Virginia.
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Right at that moment, I was both relieved that I’m childless and terrified for every parent I know. The level of danger some kids feel while walking in a school is foreign to me, and now I’m doing a 180-degree turn against the cell phone ban.