If your friend's 9 year old is already in middle school, that is a whole different set of problems. Her son is with tweens and teens where today's norm is having a cell phone. As for the students treating him like an alien, that is not a cell phone problem, it is an empathy problem. It is ridiculous to suggest banning everybody from having something just because one person cannot afford it. What happens when others get new shoes or a new car in high school?Call me old fashioned, but I think that it's really dumb to allow students to have cell phones in the classroom. I really don't care what all of the excuses are, but I will say this...I have a friend whose income is low enough that her kids are on the federal school lunch program, she struggles to get by each month, and just cannot afford for her son to have a cell phone. Her kid's school policy is no phones in class. Yet repeatedly the math teacher says to all the middle schoolers for them to get out their phones in order to use them as calculators...and her son is treated by the students AND the teacher like some sort of alien from another world because he doesn't have his own phone.
If you need a calculator...USE A CALCULATOR, NOT A PHONE AS A CALCULATOR in the classroom.
I suspect that the way I feel about this might not be the norm and y'all can certainly bite my head off and defend all the reasons why a 9 year old needs a phone at school, but let's just keep our heads on straight for a moment, ok?
What happened when WE were in school and we needed to reach 1 of our parents?
You went to the FRONT OFFICE and used the SCHOOL'S PHONE to call Mom or Dad or Grandma or your guardian, etc.
What happens when people spends tons of time in front of their tablets & smart phones? They disengage from the people sitting right in front of them. We all have seen it countless times in restaurants and heck, even at DL and WDW. How do you establish solid relationships with others? YOU TALK TO THEM...not through text messaging...not through Twitter...not through Snapchat. You have an actual conversation that involves speaking out loud, not by typing.
Ok, getting off my soap box now.
And you cannot judge how engaged people or how solid their relationship is by observing a snapshot of their life and what they are doing in a restaurant. We are always on our phones in a restaurant. But that is because if we are, that usually means we have been together all day, conversing and interacting, and this is now our downtime.
And I can have an actual conversation by typing. It is still conversing and interacting with each other. Perhaps the family is conversing about something private that they don't want the busybodies at the next table that are watching and judging them to hear.
In my kid's school, the office phone was off limits unless for an emergency.
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