My students are in the electric ocean. They twitter, they facebook, they google, they flickr and then they wii. The great electric tide has picked up their lives, washed them into pixels and spread them around the world. And I am in favor of that, within reason.

The world they will inherit will have vast, surging waves of electric life. They will need to e-mail their co-workers, write for the website, text their bosses, and broadcast their resumes. Noone will be getting jobs in the typing pool or on the scribes desk. If I want my students to be fat, happy, and forty, they will need to master dozens of tools that didnπt exist even five years ago.

Most classrooms havenπt changed much since the Neolithic. Put most teachers in a cave with a big piece of chalk and we could do a pretty good job with the FOIL method and sentence diagramming. The most daring change schools have made involve colored markers and TV sets. Recently, some schools have given their teachers computers and projectors, but those pieces of technology havenπt moved the classroom into the present or even the recent past. There isnπt a shillings worth of difference between a chalkboard and a Powerpoint presentation.

Teaching is the most conservative profession we have; change comes to the classroom last. Schools exist to transmit the values of the adults to the kids. We want them to do things the way we did things. We want them to look things up in the encyclopedia instead of wikipedia, read instead of watch, and write instead of blog. As a result, the best schools are counter-cultural islands where we try to copy ourselves onto the next generation.

Education finds itself between these two colliding schizophrenic wishes. On one hand, we want our kids ready to compete in the new millennium. On the other hand, we want them to have the values and skills of the past millennium. Kids today have to be able to script a webpage and have wonderful handwriting. They have to be able to collaborate and criticize and then be able to take notes for a lecture. We want them to use the computer as much as possible, except on high stakes tests when they get #2 pencils.

On the whole, the schizophrenic gets along quite well. Kids use the technology to swim in the electric ocean outside school day. Then, when the bell rings, we get them to swim ashore, sit in their seats, and think. Recently, the ocean has risen into a tsunami that has washed over our little islands.

And it came on cell-phones.

Cell-phones started with such lovely promise for us. With them, we can catch hold of the children, no matter where they are. When the curfew hour approaches, we can call the number and remind Our Little Snowflake that itπs time to leave the milk and cookies and come home. Helicopter Parents now have a bungie cord attached to the offspring. We can remind her to go to the dentist after school, to remember to walk her little brother home, and to try her hardest on that Algebra test. The maternal voice of God rings in her purse whenever the Almighty feels the urge to reach out. .

But it is hard in the cave, with my piece of chalk and my algebraic equations, when all of those Mommies ring the phones. And Mommy isnπt the only one on the phone. It flashes, vibrates, or sings with Something Important constantly. Politely, and surreptitiously, the kids slip them under their desk, read the message, and can text a reply to their friends while staring blankly at the teacher. In one class last year, at the height of prom season, eight cellphones were in use in five minutes.

More than just being a distraction, cell-phones actively enable a high school students worst instincts. High school students are in a tyranny of friends; in that world, the phones are a peer pressure force multiplier. Young men and women are acutely attuned to the opinion of the mob. Stepping away from their friends opinions requires courage and self-inspection. Outward Bound and other wilderness programs pull them out of their culture and plop them alone under a pine tree for some re-evaluation. Cell-phones do the exact opposite; the kids are on stage for their friends view, judgement, and ridicule.

Finally, the phones not only take the wind of peer pressure and turn it into a volcano, but they can take pictures of it too. Embarrassing pictures of clothing or social misadventures are captured, broadcast, and memorialized onto the internet. When a fight breaks out, the crowd transforms into Geraldos. They hold their cell-phones in the air and film the contretemps. Remember your most embarrassing adolescent mistake (mine involved a sun lamp). Now, imagine it circling the country in photos.

Cellphones are the most efficient cowboys of the social herd. With them, the cattle get their instructions and the punishment for disobeying the cowboys. The whole herd clings to itself, immobile and terrorized.

My school has just banned them; we are attempting to pull the schoolhouse out of the electric ocean. Without the buzzing electric reminders and recorders, students have the space to make mistakes and the silence to listen to the person deep inside their chests. After school, they can flickr, twitter, and wii to their hearts content. But in school, we want to spread the herd out. This ban may not help them on the corner with their friends. , but it will later on, when the herd has been dispatched and they stand alone in the elements.