10,000 text messages during school

There is some news you just have to stop and read. You just have to wonder what the hell someone was thinking. Or in this case, what was not being thought about.

It seems that a teenaged girl in Wyoming spent 8 hours a day, most of this time in school, sending 300 text messages for a month (10,000 in total). The result was a nearly $5,000 bill for her parents and failing grades in her classes. Her dad, understandably upset, smashed her cell phone after reading the bill.

So beyond the cost of this misadventure I have a big question. Why do kids need cellphones, especially while they are in school?

In the rush of technology to keep every user constantly in contact with every other user in creation, the question of need and use have flown out the window. That seems to be the root of the problem, along with a lack of self-discipline that appears to be the hallmark of the youth of today.

Kids have gone to school literally for over a century without access to any communication beyond their lungs. It has worked fine for generations. But now we have cellphones and the internet. And kids are getting dumber for all the improvements at their disposal. Seriously, the average kid today has less common sense and knowledge than ever before.

Text messages are a great example of one of the distractions facing kids. Add to that internet access, and the ability to play games on phones or to carry portable game systems and you have the growth of ADHD. If you couple these technological advances with music videos, internet film clips, television shows that are based in absolute stupidity (like Jackass), and movies that believe in flash and fast cuts over substance you can understand why kids have no concept of consequences of actions.

But back to my point, a cell phone in school. What is it’s purpose? What is so important for a child to say to anyone that it must be done when they are supposed to be learning?

Smashing this one phone is a symbol that I think everyone should have. Because there really is no reason to have it in the first place.

Oh, since the phone has been gone the grades of this teenage girl have gone back up to B’s, where they were before she had the cell phone.