Joining the Information Age

As a teacher, I try to keep up with the trends of communication. This blog started because my students were blogging and I wanted to see what it was all about.

So at the start of this new school year, I took a look at how my students like to communicate. They do not email . . . email is soooo passe, so last week. They text. They text all the time. They would spend their whole time in school texting, if we didn't let them plug into the internet so they can illegally try and get past the firewall so they can . . . well, I don't know what the fad of the minute is. Guess I will find out next week. (I was going to say Twitter, but I think that is "soooo five minutes ago" by now)

So in my resolution to be more organized this year and therefore making my life easier, smoother and less stressed (HA!) (and yes, I make resolutions in late August . . . makes more sense than January), I sent the whole yearbook staff a letter about goals for the first weeks of school. One of those goals was to actually have yearbook students selling yearbooks at registration, instead of Emily selling all the yearbooks. In the letter, I gave them my email address . . . and my phone number so they could text me.

Adults reel at this idea. Give them my phone number? Give the enemy my phone number? What if they call you? For the most part they don't. If anything, by giving them my phone number, I get more parent calls . . . which if you think about it, the school will give them my number anyhow. I did, however, get a lot of texts. Many, many text messages. More text messages than I have received from any of my friends. And my friends are not particularly low tech.

And all of the text messages are long . . . paragraphs. Students would wouldn't write me three sentences in ninth grade are sending me books on my phone. Perhaps they all have qwerty keyboards? I do not. So I am seeing the light on "ttyl" speech. It's just less for me to figure out on the number board.

So my triumph today, besides getting a bunch of students to volunteer to sit around and sell yearbooks basically by tricking them by letting them text, was to group their numbers in my phone address book and be able to send them a mass text. It was so cool. Except that they all replied . . .

Keep in mind that when I text, I have to count . . . a "u" is 8 two times . . . one, two . . . so not only do I have to spell in my head, but then scan and count. Tedious. I have to get a new phone for this.