It was one of those meh days. All classes got rated "there was more talking that working going on". I explained the assignment. It was on the board. I passed out paper, offered my assistance, and then left them to it.
In 4th period, a student came over to me. He held his cell phone out to me. He wanted to know what something meant.
Cell phone usage in class is a huge issue, especially at the continuation high school. They know they're not supposed to use them, and they know I can confiscate them (although they don't believe that I will). So, having a student hold out his cell phone was curious.
The assignment was a worksheet on sentence fragments. The boy had looked up the meaning of "fragment" on his phone, and he wanted me to show him which definition applied.
If he had looked up "sentence fragment"...
I explained the error. Then I got a chance to do my job.
He caught on pretty quickly. A couple times he checked to make sure that he was correctly identifying whether the group of words was a sentence or a fragment.
He was one of the two students in class who were actually doing their assignment.
So, I probably should have confiscated that cell phone, but I just didn't have the heart. I like to encourage them to do the assignment.
Wednesday, December 5, 2012
4 comments:
I appreciate your comments.
I respond to comments* via email, unless your profile email is not enabled. Then, I'll reply in the comment thread. Eventually. Probably.
*Exception: I do not respond to "what if?" comments, but I do read them all. Those questions are open to your interpretation, and I don't wish to limit your imagination by what I thought the question was supposed to be.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I wouldn't have confiscated that phone either.
ReplyDeleteCell phone usage was never a problem in my classroom. The kids' phones were confiscated anyway when they arrived at the school and even if they weren't, it was located so far in the middle of nowhere that there was never any signal.
I believe you definitely made the right choice.
ReplyDeleteI concur. The kid wasn't using his phone to chat or text or play games. He was using it to try to the assigned work correctly. Yay him!
ReplyDeleteAt least he was actually using it to work. Definitely not an issue this time.
ReplyDelete