How in the nine billion names of God did it get to this: Dead in the middle of a lecture on Plato or sociological concepts or Joyce, some god-awful ear-piercingly high shriek of Beethoven’s Ninth repeats over and over again until the dipstick, realizing the phone is his or hers, fumbles among candy wrappers and Chapstick to turn it off, only for it—or another—to go off five minutes later. And I love the people who are too humiliated to take responsibility, instead simply allowing the phone to complete a cycle of four or five irritating, nails-on-chalkboard bastardizations of classical music.
Upon starting to lecture, every professor at Harvard should have three things at his or her disposal: chalk, a visual projector and 35 inches of lead pipe. All three are tools for teaching a lesson, but I feel the third would make the point most bluntly. And the professor would be required to use it every time a student’s phone goes off.
State and local lawmakers have begun to regulate cell phone use in cars. They base these policies on the argument that since we can’t concentrate as well when we’re using one hand and two halves of our brain to talk while driving, it’s a threat to public safety. Let me modify this to apply to cell phones in classrooms: Since nobody can concentrate when “Yankee Doodle Dandy” blares from somebody’s cheap Nokia, that person’s safety deserves to be put in some serious jeopardy. Hit the [expletive deleted] with a pipe.
