The Former Anne Spollen's Author Blog Is Being Retitled to "Notes from Living Upghetto": The New Contraband

Monday, March 10, 2008

The New Contraband - Part I

Cell phones are banned by most schools, at least for the student population. Their reasoning is that students will not focus on their work if they are carrying a cell phone. They are probably right about that. And since there is nothing else to distract high school and middle school kids from memorizing the chief exports of Guatemala, I'm sure the cell phone banish is, like so many educational policies, highly effective.

The thing is, almost every kid has a cell phone. And if they don't have a cell phone, they want one. And the ban on cell phones has only served to cast them into the Hidden Zone, like the cigarette/pot contraband of yesteryear. (Ok, my year)

On the days when I pick my kids up from school, I like to count the steps their friends take before pulling their cells out. They like to glare at any adult around while holding the phone to their ear. The other day, while picking my son up early, a student I knew did just this. She walked importantly around the courtyard where the buses were gathering, frowning into the phone like a diplomat getting bad news about the war.

Since it was one of the few times I have stood in that courtyard without any other students around, I decided to ask Sarah a question that has been haunting me. "Hey," I said quietly,
"how are you, Sarah?"
She nodded, then clicked off the phone.
"Listen, can you answer a question?"
She shrugged. "Maybe."
"Who do you guys talk to as soon as you leave the building? Aren't all your friends here?"
"Yeah. I was just talking to my mom. I asked her to wash my red pants." Sarah rolled her eyes.
"And she didn't?" I asked, remembering the frown.
"Nope. She forgot."
"Is that who you usually call?"
"Yeah. None of my friends can answer now. All their phones are in their lockers."
"Right," I agreed.
My son walked toward us, his eyes riveted to his phone, his thumb moving frantically across the keypad. As I watched him check phantom messages, it occurred to me that cell phones had replaced cigarettes not only as locker contraband, but as social behavior. I was about to tell him this when Christopher told me how a student, a friend of his, had just used his camera phone to
film a teacher speaking inappropiately during a class.
"What's he going to do with the film?" I asked.
"Maybe post it onto youtube."
At that moment, I began to rethink my position on why the school administration really had banned phones from the building.

2 comments:

The CatManDo said...: I never understood why high school kids can drive to school but not have cell phones. Makes no sense. Are they allowed to carry them on their belts or display them? Or do they have to be put away? What about a terrorist attack? All the phones in the lockers?; Tuesday, 11 March, 2008
Jennifer Oberth said...: I think kids having phones in one way, is more for the parents. Better to keep tabs on the kids, to know that the kid can reach help/be reached at the click of a button. Or at least, that may be how it started.

There was a kid next to me in the movie theater - rated R and I swear he looked 6 - but his cell phone rang and he answered it.
Is this just one more thing for the next generation to miss learning manners?; Friday, 14 March, 2008

Post a Comment

Books

Light Beneath Ferns

"I have this strange sense that my silence is preparing me for something I can't name . ."

Elizah Rayne is nothing like other fourteen-year-old girls. More interested in bird bones than people, she wraps herself in silence. Trying to escape the shadow of her gambler father, Elizah and her mother move into an old house that borders a cemetery. All her mother wants is for them to have "normal" lives. But that becomes impossible for Elizah when she finds a human jawbone by the river and meets Nathaniel, a strangely hypnotic boy who draws Elizah into his dreamlike and mysterious world.

Only by forgetting everything she knows can Elizah understand the truth about Nathaniel—and discover an unimaginable secret.

Teen made trailer for Light Beneath Ferns.

Order Light Beneath Ferns here.

Foreword Magazine's Review of Light Beneath Ferns

Excerpt from THE SHAPE OF WATER

CHAPTER ONE
I discovered windows one afternoon and after that, nothing was ever the same. They had always been there, of course, glass panes shimmering in the color of rain, but that spring for the first time, I was able to open the windows in my room. For years, the locks had been painted stuck, and during the winter, heat from the radiator beneath my windows finally steamed off enough paint off the metal wings of the locks could be twirled open. Knowing that I could open the windows attracted me to them, and I began sitting under the windows, staring through the glass at the sky. From that position, on a chair in my room, the sky did not seem real; it seemed a place I was making up, so I watched it.
The white wood of the window panes acted as frames so the sky came to me slowly, and the huge openness of its space did not touch me. All the window glass in our old house had wavers and bubbles inside it, so at times the clouds moved like water, melting and blurring until they passed outside of the warp. After a few afternoons of sitting, the heavens seemed too quiet to keep watching so I began watching a small patch of woods next to our yard that housed little more than trees and a scatter of bony, mean-looking rabbits.
I started gazing at the sky and the woods in March when the branches were still wet and it was then, with nothing outside my window but trees and rain, that I noticed a shine inside darkness, I noticed colors glimmering within the darkness of the wood. I watched birds come and go, I watched rain nipple down from buds to the grass. The water dripping from branch edges and leaves created optical tricks; I could see that as I watched leaves melt.
Then one day I ventured into the space outside. I did not think about doing this much beforehand. I simply opened the window and dropped to the ground below, uncertain as to why this should be such a more satisfying exit than simply using the door; my father worked until seven o’clock and I could do whatever I wanted until then. But I liked the solid sound my legs made when I landed. Leaving via a five foot drop seemed so much more a decision than just using a door. The sense of escape made my heart pound, though all I escaped was the soundless spread of moss-colored light inside my house and the silence.
I had come to know silence well during those months after my mother died. When you sit in silence long enough, you learn that silence has a motion. It glides over you without shape or form, but with weight, exactly like water. Its color is silver. And silence has a sound you hear only after hours of wading inside it. The sound is soft, flute notes rising up like the words of glass speaking. There comes a point when you must shatter the silence, when you must shatter the blindness of its words, the blindness of its light. I did this by going into the yard. Once I stood there, in the grass next to the trees I had been watching, I found silence outside as well. But I was happier outside than I had been in the house, so I stayed for a bit. I stood beneath my bedroom window for a few minutes, looking up at the branches and the crooked pieces of sky colliding between the branches. I believed I could identify the scent of the sky as I stood there, a blue menthol fragrance similar to the scent of seawater that sprayed into my face when I first dove into the ocean. That initial scent smelled much more subtle than the ocean’s heavy, fishy aroma, a whiff of salt and mint that warned a more powerful scent would enter my nose just as I approached the water on a dive. It was the scent I dreamed in. And it was the scent of that spring sky as I stood in my yard.

***