Academia in the Age of Cell Phones - Shut Them Off!

Growing up in an age where most people own a cell phone, I often take their introduction into everyday life for granted. This is of course, not the case when it comes to classroom procedures. While attending college I observed not one, not two, but several people over the years openly converse on their cell phones mid-lecture. Some of these occurred in large, heavily populated lecture halls, in which the acoustics are already somewhat tricky, thus the cell phone conversations made it that much harder for other students to take decent lecture notes.

The first time this happened I was so upset and surprised by the behavior that I was speechless. The young "lady" who decided to call her roommate out of sheer boredom didn't seem to have a problem reciting the drunken debauchery from the night before. I sat there attempting to take notes on the popular culture of the fifties, while she went on and on about some guy she had met the night before. And what did the professor do about the situation? He stood at the bottom of the lecture hall, trying to grasp the attention of several hundred students. Chances are, he wasn't even aware of the situation, though I find that very hard to believe considering other professors in that same hall had spotted smaller interruptions and put an end to them immediately.

Over the next few years I spotted more mid-lecture cell phone users, and to my astonishment, some took place in classrooms with as few as fifty students. Late in my college career I witnessed a conversation, which took place in a room filled with no more than twenty-five! My stunned-silence did not last long. I had been so appalled by this new trend that I decided to become very vocal about the situation. This is not to say that I am a tattletale, quite the opposite. I decided it would be better by far to approach the conversationalist either during or after class.