The “No Cell Phone” policy which so many schools still have in place just doesn’t make sense to me. Why? Because the phone of today is, well… no longer a phone.

Yes, phones are phones. But they are also…

• planners so kids can keep track of all their assignments.
• research tools to quickly find facts, reference info, and the such.
• blah, blah, blah. (Really, if I kept listing and listing all the possibilities of today’s phones, I’d never be able to stop typing right now and get to my bigger idea.)

The point is, the phone of today has evolved into a pocket computer of immense dimensions. In fact, it often operates as the central operational tool for many, many people’s lives. Especially the people who make the “No Cell Phone” policies for our school districts. (Can you even imagine the district personnel without their Blackberries? What would the Asst. Supt do without their iPhone? My goodness, how would so much of the dysfunction continue to amble along if not for these devices? Alas, I stray.)

Virtually 90% of the white collar workers I know who earn six-figure salaries are absolutely dependent on their cell phones. Phones have literally evolved into an indispensable business tool and yet, in all this college readiness talk we hear all the time, we seem to have this wall of hypocrisy separating our stated aims from our actual implemented policies. To be “college ready” means to be able to function in a wired world with proficiency and aptitude. (I am not sure when it happened entirely, I am not sure if they sent out a memo but in this day and age, the two ideas are almost inextricably wed.)

College applications are online, college schedules are online, college financial aid info, professor office hours, and on and on… what isn’t online in today’s college world? The move towards entirely paperless is afoot! Not sure if it will ever reach 100% saturation but it is semi-fascinating to witness the laptop give way to the smart phone and the tablet computer.
And we have a front row seat.

Th irony is not lost that the people who swear that “cell phones in the hands of today’s middle and high school kids is a poor idea” are the same people who would be professionally neutered if you took away their own cell phones.

Is fear of texting really a sufficient reason to ban cell phones? We don’t ban pencil and paper just because the kids may write notes to one another and doodle.

Yet, by this same logic, we ban cell phones. (A ban, which BTW, is hardly working. Kids HAVE cell phones. And their parents are the ones who most often bought these phones for them.) It just seems smarter to teach them how to wisely use the devices as opposed to trying make the students of today “put that thing away before I take it!”
Having a keen facility with these devices is going to eventually be really, really, critical for the students of tomorrow

In fact, in many ways, it already is for the most cutting edge students of today. Let’s harness the educational power of technology instead of suppressing it. Times have changed and the phone of even 3 years ago is not the phone of today.

Scott Adams, the author and creator of the comic strip Dilbert, last year argued in an essay that smart phones represent a kind of “exobrain” that augments our regular brain, giving us the ability to store and retrieve mountains of information… and to perform tasks – like navigating unfamiliar terrain – which extend our mental capacities.

Does this mean our “endobrain” becomes less developed as a result of having an exobrain? Or does it get to actually focus on deeper, more significant (at least to the brain’s owner) things?

Is technology like an office secretary which allows the CEO to focus on (ostensibly) higher level tasks while someone else handles the more menial, more “grunt work-like” like chores of of day-to-day living?

I think about a story I once heard about Einstein. He bought something like 10 gray suits with matching shirts and ties. The reason? He didn’t want to waste precious mental energy on deciding what to wear every day. He made one good decision and replicated it so that, I imagine, he could ponder the nature of the universe… as opposed to ponder what the heck color socks would match his green tie.

Of course, I used to remember all sorts of phone numbers. No longer. Why? Because they are stored in my phone. Am I less intelligent as a result – or have my neurons been liberated to crack the riddle of the Teen Sphinx? (What does not walk on three legs at night yet think it knows the answer to every riddle it’s posed – and if it does not know the answer it deems the knowledge probably not worth knowing? Or something like that.)

Is there merit to this exobrain argument? Why should kids remember who the major players were in the War of 1812 when the info is readily available to them via google? It’s the lessons to be learned about war, leadership, governance and so on that make knowing the players in that war pertinent – and when schools only test rote memorization about such subject matters, we show our folly. (Not that I really want to devolve into bashing bubble tests right now – but sometimes, I just can’t help it. So often they merely assess such surface level knowledge that if a kid had a smartphone, there’d be nothing to these tests at all – and in an age where more and more and more of us have smart phones, what is the real value of this sort of assessment?)

And for those who posit the argument, “Well, what if the “cloud of computing goes down, where will we be then?” I wonder if they are prepared to cook by open fire and live off of salted meats should the power grids go down in all our cities. Are they ready to live without electricity? This tech is here and, like electricity, we are already dependent on it.

Is there merit in this exobrain theory?

I just went to the Kindle App to buy a copy of the book THE WESTING GAME, a YA award-winner which I wanted to start reading tonight.

Except the Kindle Store didn’t have a copy of the book THE WESTING GAME. However, the iBooks store did.

15 seconds and $5.99 later I was on Chapter 1, Sunset Towers.

I found this funny though because the Kindle Store is supposed to trump the iBook store by about a ba-zillion more titles. Yet the one I wanted wasn’t there.

And then I realized, “Do I care?”

Really, do I care?

Nope, I got my book, that’s what mattered. To me, there’s no real discernible difference between the Kindle App and the iBook app. I mean they are different, but not so much that I give a real poop.

What I wanted was the content.

Did I care who won the VHS vs BETA fight?
Do I care who wins the HD DVD vs BLU RAY battle?
Hasn’t the PC vs Apple battle already given me enough headaches in my life? And now Google with Android is gonna come chime in? Great. Just great.

As a customer, I don’t care. I just want the content. I don’t care if Sony Pictures or Warner Bros makes the movie at the local theater… I just care about the movie. I don’t care if Little Brown or Hachette publishes the latest Michael Lewis book… I just want the Michael Lewis book.

Yes, I really dig Apple products because of the way they allow me to interface with content. Their stuff is beautiful. But I don’t own an iPhone because in Los Angeles I need a phone to be able to make a phone call and ATT drops about 50 ba-zillion iPhone calls a day near where I live.

When will these people get it? I don’t care who provides the material for me. I just want the material.

When I really think about it, corporate loyalty is dead, almost a sucker’s play. Direct TV would sell me out as a customer in a heartbeat if a sweet buyout opp. came along for their shareholders, even if it meant I’d be relegated to going back to using rabbit ears on my TV.

And in schools, forget it. Only a fool stays loyal to a company right now. Buy the best product, the tool that best meets your academic needs.

Spend 48 minutes on hold with Blue Cross or see how faceless you are to Bank America when your online banking goes down if you doubt me.

Airlines, chain restaurants, car rental agencies… they pay for propaganda that sells the idea of “we’re loyal like your family” but they are not.

All I wanted was THE WESTING GAME. What I got was real insight. Maybe that’s why it won the Newberry?

When I think about one of the most important ingredients a professional must bring to the table, I inevitably come back to passion.

To caring.

To giving a damn.

For me it is the epoxy that holds work which is of true, genuine value together.

I think about this often when I make my way through this world. When I shop in markets. When I go to the post office. When I call a mega-conglom about my various household services.

Sad to say it, but mediocrity reigns in this day and age and the truth is, I think we have all become so beaten down by crud-o-la performance that we are willing to settle for mediocrity because it at least lets us get in and out of the encounters without too much duress. After all, who hasn’t experienced the 45 minute phone call to nowhere-ville with any one of a dozen banks, cable companies, phone service carriers and so on?

It sucks the downright life out of you!

Heck, when I fly on airplanes the lack of passion for the work being done by almost all airline employees in terms of making my travel experience feel pleasant is glaring. Sheesh, it’s almost laughable to even expect anything more than mediocrity from the airlines nowadays. (Yet, having said that VIRGIN AMERICA and, to an extent SOUTHWEST, do show a verve you just don’t see in most other domestic carriers.)

But what makes the difference in a school? In many ways, it’s just this. Passion. Caring. Dedication. Commitment. Dynamic vitality! When I see a staff of teachers who are fired up about the kids, about the work, about meeting the challenges of the job, I can’t help but feel a sense of pride that, “This is what education is all about.”

And when I see a student that show a steely resolve to meet a challenge, give a better effort, step up their performance, and actually try to “learn” something I become energized and excited and even that much more willing to give even more of myself.

Vigor is contagious. Those who tap that well in their classrooms this year will almost certainly reach and teach more young people than those who do not.

Spend yourself this year. Spend yourself heartily!

I clearly remember a few years ago when my wife said (proudly), “I don’t text.”

That was when she had a phone without a keypad. Now, she loves texting. We communicate/coordinate/touch base with one another through texting. The fact is, texting is a convenient, concise and very user-friendly mode of communication.

And teen girls between the ages of 14-17 seem to agree as the latest data shows that this demographic is now sending approximately 100 text messages per day.

That’s 700 per week.

That’s 3,000 per month.

That’s around 36,000 per year.

And what does that tell us?

1) Get your kid an unlimited texting plan or you are going to pay through the wazoo!

2) Fill in your own blank. If you want to view these numbers through a sour P.O.V. you certainly have the ammo to rail against the influence of hand-held media devices on the youth of today. On the other hand, if you see the upside of new literacies and want to make a case for the role of embracing these tools into the modern day classroom (as opposed to outlawing their use) you certainly have a few arrows in your quiver as well.

Last week I mentioned about me being up on stage speaking to a large group of big kahunas from all over the state. Basically district officers and principals.

Now one of the unspoken rules of public speaking is that it’s a good idea not to fight with the audience members. Pander, don’t provoke.

Let’s just say that my behavior onstage sometimes proves that I didn’t get that memo.

It started with a high ranking woman taking a bit of umbrage with my stance that using cell phones in class, as woven into the fabric of a lesson plan, is a much more sensible approach than banning cell phones outright. Why? Because cell phones are here to stay and they virtually demand their own type of literacy and if we can leverage the students’ love of technology and build a bridge between using their cell phone and using their brain to achieve an academic objective, there is nothing wrong with doing so.

Matter of fact, I believe we ought to do more of it. Prohibiting cell phones on campus just strikes me as a battle we will never win. Especially since most teens have their parents buy them their cell phones in the first place which automatically gives cell phone approval that trumps my own disapproval (if I were to disapprove, of course.)

Anyway, that set the stage. She took umbrage with my cell phone stance. And why?

“Because,” as she said, “she can remember back in the 1980′s when kids were doing drug deals in class with their pagers.”

Okay, I won’t even go there. We all know that’s an argument I wouldn’t dare touch because it’s be like take out a bazooka against a person that barely held a poorly constructed bow and arrow.

But then she continued and said, “For example, I just left a session where the person next to me was texting the whole time. I mean they missed the whole session while fiddling with their cell phone. And it was a good session, too. They missed some valuable stuff.”

Now the fight is more fair here, right?

Let’s take a look at her presumption.

First of all, the txt-er could have been tweeting the whole session because they were riveted and really wanted to spread the awesome info to 1,268 of their followers.

Or perhaps, they were taking note on their phone.

Maybe they were live-blogging?

Her presumption that because the person was txting they were missing out on the info could have been preposterously wrong.

Then again, this presupposes the inverse is true – that just because someone is looking at you, they are actually listening to what you are saying.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had my eyes lasered in on some kind of lame consultant as they fumble through a Power Point with an expression that beamed, “I am riveted by your genius!” while inside my brain, I was thinking, “I wonder if Subway is still running that $5 footlong deal. Boy, they have good pepperoncinis.”

In this day and age, a person on the phone is not necessarily a person on the phone and a person looking you in the eye might really be thinking, “McDonalds… I am lovin’ it!”