Spring Break
Know your text-messaging limits before being caught at school
Tony Gonzalez - Star Tribune (Minneapolis)Issue date: 9/4/08 Section: News
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Then it's up to teachers to offer a warning, or confiscate the cell phone, and almost unavoidably disrupt class time - yet another text-messaging distraction that teachers and administrators see as a growing nuisance.
The Pew Research Center reported this year that 71 percent of American teens own a cell phone (compared with 45 percent in 2004), that 50 percent of teens sometimes use informal capitalization and punctuation in school assignments and that 38 percent have used texting lingo (such as "LOL," for "laughing out loud") in schoolwork.
During class, teachers see students texting on phones "hidden" in pockets. High-pitched ringtones, which adults can't hear, add a new challenge.
"In this day and age, if you take a cell phone away from a teenager, it's like carving out their heart," said Steve Hill, principal at Jefferson High School in Bloomington, Minn.
To avoid such gruesome punishment, parents and students may heed the advice of Hill and other teachers and administrators, who offer the following warnings and suggestions for teen texting etiquette at school.
1. There's a time and a place for texting.
At Humboldt High School in St. Paul, Minn., teacher Paul Richardson, 26, says that many students have a firm grasp on when text-messaging nicknames and abbreviations are acceptable.
"I've heard other teachers be vocal about being frustrated with some of the slang that shows up in papers," Richardson said. "I feel like, as long as they can switch back and forth (from formal to informal styles), and if they're writing, they're learning to communicate in a writing way."
Kofi Adragni, a graduate student and statistics instructor at the University of Minnesota, explicitly wrote in his syllabus: "All course work must be fully readable; text messaging acronyms and jargon are not accepted."
"I see abbreviations so many times," Adragni said. "Sometimes I can't single them out to find out what they stand for."
He doesn't worry about texting during class. Students suffer if they do: "For someone to come to my classroom for a lecture, but spend their time text-messaging, is a waste of time. But that's their business."
2. Know the consequences.
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