Friday, August 9, 2019

Will Passing Notes in Class Become a Thing Again?

Recently I read via Facebook that my local school district will be banning cell phones during school hours. I may not have children, but I agree with most of what was said in the article. And I was immediately reminded of something:





If you grew up then, as I did, you will remember this sort of thing. Kids would try not to get caught so their notes would not be confiscated by the teacher. If that happened, the note would either be tossed into to the garbage can or stored in the teacher's desk drawer. Or even worse--according to many people--read outloud to the class by the teacher. Sometimes the students themselves were forced to read the note.

This was among the things I recalled in my memoir, along with not being able to have a Walkman or a boom box at school. Upon reading the article linked on Facebook, I replied, reminding people of note passing, asking will it become a thing again now that kids aren't allowed to text in class? A class mate then recalled not being able to have a Walkman at school in the 80s, saying "I think the concern was theft of valuables?" And kids today aren't worried about this with their cell phones and laptops? All this stuff can wait until they get home from school. I had to wait till then to use my cassette player or watch TV. Kids today have to learn to wait for things like this as well. Many things are just too easy and too quick to access for kids these days. 

Since I have been working on a book set in the 1980s, it seemed inevitable to include references to note passing. The mean girl clique are caught passing notes in social studies on the first day of school. In another scene, the protagonist and his equally geeky classmates find a note dropped outside the classroom and see remarks made about themselves. They immediately know that the note was from the mean girls. 

2 comments:

Elephant's Child said...

I remember note passing, but not being part of the 'in crowd' it was something I watched rather than participated in.
There are moves afoot here to ban phones in class as well. I suspect it will be an uphill battle.

Jamie Ghione said...

I was not a note-passer myself, but do remember seeing this happen.