Don't Look at Me!

Not all attention is positive (shocker!)

Setting: My classroom, afternoon work time. The students are busy and quiet in that way that you can hear a pin drop, but can also almost hear their brain gears running. Everyone is working through a to-do list at their own pace, and the mood is productively peaceful.

All of a sudden, the air is split with the sounds of a math app (#3 on the to-do list), and the student who forgot to plug in her headphones first is frantically shushing her iPad: “SHHH SHHH SHHH!” to no avail (obviously). She is obviously aghast but I start laughing because we have all been there.

Unwanted attention is the worst, and our beloved technology is often the culprit. This isn’t a new issue — I remember volunteer firefighters’ beepers going off in church when I was young. Luckily, my childhood pastor had one of the most glorious senses of humor I’ve experienced, so those times were always good for a punchline. In fact, the memorial service for Pastor Massaro was just this past weekend, and it was full of remembrances of such unexpected moments, including a time when one congregant became the proud owner of an electronic watch… with an alarm that went off during a sermon one Sunday.

I like to imagine that my memory is fantastic, and I can keep track of where all of my students are supposed to be every minute of the day. I also think I should be able to remember to plug in my mini-crockpot at 11am so that my lunch is warm when I have time to eat it, but let’s be real. I’m a 48-year-old, perimenopausal woman with 20 4th-grade students, 3 of whom are asking me questions at any particular time, so how do I remember who has to go to Speech?

All of this is to say, I have many, many alarms set on my phone for school days:

5:15am — School Day! (my wake-up call)

8:23am — Student A, Nurse (he’s been remembering lately, but…)

8:55am — Take Attendance (you do NOT want to have to get the call from the office!)

9:19am — Student B, Special Education (right in the middle of Reading)

10:34am — Students B & C, Special Education (right in the middle of Math)

11:00am — Plug in your lunch! (mmm… lunch)

12:37pm — Student D to Social Worker, every Thursday

12:38pm — Student E speech, Tuesday and Thursday

12:49pm — Student C speech, Tuesday and Thursday

1:56pm — Flexible Math Intervention and Student F Title Reading, Wednesday only

2:00pm — Tuesday folders, Tuesday only (obviously) (unless I forget but then I don’t have a backup alarm for the next day which is why the Tuesday folder stuff from December 17th still hasn’t been sent home)

2:23pm — 2nd Title Math and Reading Groups, Monday-Tuesday-Thursday-Friday

What does all of this madness have to do with my poor student with the iPad misfortune?

A few years ago, I was asked to sing at the funeral service for the father of a friend of mine. I had to take a half day off from school (not a hardship) as the service began at 11am. I was sitting up on the dias of the church, so facing the congregation as they filed in. Just before the family was going to enter, I heard my alarm going off — I guess somebody was supposed to go to group! I did the panicked pawing-through-my-purse routine and got the phone shut off before many people noticed, but OH my face was red.

That was not the only time the alarms have been an unwelcome surprise — teacher trainings, field trips, vacations — but it was certainly the worst. You might be wondering why I don’t just shut my phone off during these times. The thing is, my phone is always set on silent. I don’t ever think about it making noise… until the alarm goes off. And NO, please don’t suggest I shut off the alarms. I do sometimes, and live with the fear of forgetting to turn them back on and getting the “You forgot to take attendance, dummy!” call from the office! (Our school secretaries are sweet and compassionate — the “dummy” is added from my own brain.)

Accidental tech invasions are generally harmless and extremely embarrassing. They can be impolite but not really rude because we didn’t mean to, we feel remorse, and we try to correct the behavior. Don’t get me started on the rude tech invasions: no headphones on public transportation, taking a phone call in the middle of a restaurant and expecting everyone else to hush, not dimming your screen in a theater, etc. That stuff should be able to be prosecuted by law.

Unlike the time my grandma was dying, and my mom was sitting at her bedside with my uncle when Mom’s phone rang… with her ringtone of “Ding, Dong, the Witch is Dead.” My mom thinks the nurse probably thought they were awful for laughing so hard while their mother was dying, but she also thinks my grandma would have thought it was pretty funny, too.

Thanks for reading.

Love, Susie