The recent furor about students using cell phones at school to cheat on exams and cause disruption to classes makes finding a solution to the problem a priority before it deteriorates into a teacher versus parent war.
When I grew up in the baby boomer era there were no cell phones and if there was something urgent then the parent would call the school on a regular phone line and ask to speak to the student or vice versa. Somehow we all survived without cell phones.
I agree that times have changed and you cannot put the genie back in the bottle. Kids have cell phones and no one is going to prize them away from them now that they are a status symbol. So how to solve the problem? Having spent over 30 years in the telecommunications industry I don’t think the solution is too expensive or difficult to implement. My solution is quite simple and could be developed by numerous telecoms manufacturers and installed in schools in a matter of months.
My solution is this. A school base station is designed where student cell phones can be lodged securely when they arrive at school. Each cell phone is set to vibrate mode and deposited in a lockable enclosure which contains a small vibrating pager (like those issued in some restaurants to diners waiting for a table) which the student removes and keeps on his or her person. When the cell phone vibrates to an incoming call the system detects the call and then triggers students pagers to vibrate alerting them to the fact a call has been received. If the student is in class then typically the call will go to voicemail and the student can request the teacher to go to the base station to retrieve the voice mail from the cell phone and make a return call.
A more sophisticated but more expensive school cell phone base station which can interface with the cell phones electronically and only relay to the pager calls from a selected caller ID’s (e.g. the parent’s phone) would ensure that the student was only alerted to incoming calls from say their parent.
In either case the student in class would have to get permission from the teacher to go to the base station to take the call so eliminating disruptive cell phone calls in class. Incorporated in the proposed base station is an electronic indicator board which would indicate if a student’s cell phone was not in its enclosure thereby alerting teachers that a cell phone was ‘on the loose’ in the school.
The proposed cell phone base station operation could be further enforced by the installation of cell phone detectors in each classroom. These units which beep any time a switched-on cell phone is detected nearby are already in manufacture and are available for a few hundred dollars.
Vincent Waterson is author of Skyhooks (ISBN 1-4196-1645-5) - A BOOTSTRAPPER’S GUIDE TO FINDING A JOB For 18 to 20 something year old American College students. It is published by amazon.com. The author can be contacted at vwaterson@aol.com |
