Whilst we were limited to placing drawing pins on the teachers chair, stuffing the board rubber into the top of the blackboard and putting something on top of the classroom door (all of which carried the very real risk of the whole class being kept in, caned or given extra homework) today's brats have the more subtle and powerful weapon of the mobile phone and camera.
One of the ways Peter Harvey was provoked was by some brat filming him on their mobile phone (which would certainly drive me up the wall.) The vast majority of Heads however, simply lack the courage to ban them in school.
6 comments:
I'm not sure of the legality of 'jamming' mobile phone signals. I have a suspicion that it's against the law.
I'd say that 'jamming' on private property should be made legal as long as it didn't 'leak' and signs reporting the jamming were displayed.
Then quiet carriages on trains could be subject to 'jamming', a publican could choose to jam all or some of the bars in a pub and schools could jam classrooms or the whole school if they so chose.
Also cinemas, theatres, churches, hospitals, oh and ........fill in your own location.
If it can be done for smoking surely it can be done for mobiles which I find much more offensive than a whiff of tobacco smoke.
Just think; signs proclaiming "This is a mobile free zone".
Bliss
My colleagues and I were wondering about 'jamming' on a don't complain don't explain basis ...I agree about the problem of filming (Who is Peter Harvey by the way?) but we also have huge difficulty controlling cheating (a national sport in France) with I-phones allowing all manner of information to be stored or even exchanged. The Baccalauréat next month promises some new challenges!
Yes, silly me, jamming wouldn't stop filming. It could stop texting in class and making and receiving phone calls in pubs for instance.
What's needed is an electromagnetic pulse generator - say a small nuclear weapon - in each classroom. Disable all complex, non-hardened electronics, including phones, cameras and ipods. And interactive whiteboards. And televisions and radios. And most cars. Hmm. Maybe not.
At my daughter's school, there's one simple rule: use or display a mobile in a lesson, and you will be excluded for the day. If your parent doesn't get there to pick you up within an hour, you be excluded for the rest of the week, or the whole of next week if it's Friday.
Anonymous, I suspect that your daughter's school has grown itself some balls because it can count on general parental support. At our school parents don't even turn up when their kids are arrested,and it's a matter of complete indifference to them if they attend school or not as long as they don't get fined. And if YOU excluded them, it's not OUR fault.
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