mobile phones in our schools

[falkor]

Holding out my hand I stare into the surly face of a large, angry teenage girl. ‘Give me the phone,’ I say in as calm a voice as I can muster. Truculently, 15-year-old Lisa glares at me. ‘What phone?’ she asks belligerently as she stuffs it back into her bag.

At this point I have a choice. I can demand that she hand the phone over; she will refuse. I can raise my voice and insist; she’ll swear at me. I can give her a detention that she won’t turn up to. Or I can decide not to waste any more lesson time and focus on the majority of the class who really want to learn and accept that, once again, a rude, disruptive child has scored a victory.

I make my decision. Turning my back I attempt to salvage some authority by telling Lisa not to let me see her phone again. ‘What phone is that, Miss?’ she sneers.
By Frances Childs PUBLISHED: 23:39, 10 May 2012
Very few teachers, especially female teachers, want to physically grapple a phone from a teenager’s hand. Girls as well as boys are likely to fly off the handle and no teacher wants to provoke a violent confrontation.

And what member of staff would want to deal with the outraged parental complaint that would inevitably follow?

Forget the old-fashioned notion that a parent might actually back the teacher and berate their brazen child. As well as out-of-control pupils, the beleaguered teacher of today also has to tackle mums and dads to whom discipline is often a dirty word.

Mobile phones sum up many of the things that are wrong in schools in modern Britain. They have become, quite simply, the scourge of the classroom. That is why many teachers, like myself, will applaud yesterday’s announcement by Sir Michael Wilshaw, the Chief Inspector of Schools, that pupils face a ban on mobile phones in school as part of a new Ofsted crackdown on discipline.

When I first began teaching 15 years ago, I had to cope with youngsters chatting during lessons, occasionally being rude to me and the odd fight that would flare up out of nowhere.

By the time I left the profession two years ago, things were even worse. At that point, some children were not only gossiping to each other, interrupting lessons and fighting as they always had done — they were also making and receiving calls, texting, and filming each other and members of staff.

Former colleagues who are still teaching tell me that footage of them trying to keep order is played back and waved aloft in order to undermine them. I’ve often heard stories of mocking clips ending up on the internet for the whole world to see.
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[Big Brother]

As you know i work in schools and they're an effing nightmare. When theyre not being stolen they're being used to film fights, organise fights or distribute obscene material. Most of my schools have enacted zero tolerance policies. Caught with it once, it's confiscated until the end of day. Caught twice, until the end of the week. Three times, and it's until the end of term.

Parents who complain are handed a transfer form and told if they don't like it, then they can remove their child and take them elsewhere.