All Over the Place: Cell Phones

From My Teaching Book

By Michael H. Brownstein

We have had a policy in my school for a while now prohibiting cell phones. I’m sorry, I just don’t seem to see this great urgency to have one. I don’t know why I would need to talk to someone all of the time everywhere I am no matter what. It puzzles me—people on the train, in the shopping center, on a date—all of them, talking, talking, talking on a cell phone. Obviously I’m one of the last people in America with a phone connected to a wall in my kitchen.
    One of my students asked, “What if there’s an emergency?”
    That’s why we have a front office. Nothing like getting a call on your cell phone telling you your mother—God forbid—has just been shot thirteen times in the chest and—then you lose your signal.
    I’d much rather have the call come to the office where we can handle it quietly and much more compassionately. Once a mother entered my classroom to tell me she had to take her son home and then she fell to the floor and became hysterical. (Someone tried to burn down her apartment and shot her father a number of times.) I needed help right then. A person’s help. Not a cell phone.
    (OK. OK. I’ll give you one emergency. Your car stops in the middle of nowhere and it’s freezing outside and you don’t know what to do. A cell phone might be handy right then.) But not in school.
    Which brings me to my story of a cell phone ringing in my classroom of seventh graders and one fifth grader so out of control, they placed him in my room because—so they think—I can control him until he is ready to go back to his own class. (Another story altogether.) The boy with the cell phone denies he has a cell phone, but not a minute later he is under his desk, the cell phone to his ear, returning the call. Unbelievable.
    “What cell phone?” he asks. “I don’t have a cell phone.”
    Some days it’s best to just breath.

Copyright © 2022 by Michael H. Brownstein Michael H. Brownstein’s volumes of poetry, A Slipknot Into Somewhere Else and How Do We Create Love?, were published by Cholla Needles Press in 2018 & 2019, respectively.