He strolled into the room and quietly laid his books on a desk. Class would begin in about three minutes; soon the teacher would be droning on about something utterly irrelevant to his life. Entirely removed from his surroundings, the small plastic gadgets in his ears piped in the words that resounded repeatedly in his head, chorusing the ideas that he has heard about sex and violence and crime—and women. Vulgarities and obscenities that had always been forbidden in mainstream American media were now a daily part of his life—a ritual—since he was six years old.
He could play that rap refrain in his brain without the assistance of an iPod, one of the most popular play toys known to post-9/11 teenagers. But the iPod somehow gave him power. The iPod increased his status. He had become the latest of the Boomers’ grandchildren to use a technology the Boomers had only dreamed of: music you choose, music you take with you, music you listen to at your whim! American high schools and middle schools, however, have not joined the hippest of all music generations in promoting the iPod craze; very few school officials condone them, allow them, or use them.
The acceptance of iPods in American secondary schools has grown tantamount to the acceptance of the small transistor radios of the 1960s, when kids snuck them into schools in order to hear the World Series (played during the daytime back then). Those radios existed—they were certainly there—but most school officials simply shrugged their shoulders in a quasi acceptance of the new technology of the time. It had become the old, “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” attitude. And was listening to the World Series—America’s Pastime, after all—really that bad?
As a teacher, I loathe the use of iPods at school for three main reasons:
1. They disrupt the kids’ concentration. Students should be thinking about what’s happening at school—ideas about algebra, government, and Whitman—not Snoop Dog’s latest bout in jail or Eminem’s most recent confrontation with guns and cops. At the very least, they should be looking at the school’s “Vision Statement”—no one can figure out its significance—that is plastered on the walls of every classroom.
2. They lose them. Bureaucratic nightmares over lost iPods tend to thwart the benefits of being ever-connected to the woes of young convicts who lament about their bitches standing them up and their homies talking shit to them.
3. They scare me. Not literally frighten, but just knowing—or having a good idea—what is being heard in those earphones at any precise moment is enough to rattle my nerves. I might try denying my most subjective assumptions and pretend as though my students were listening to the Righteous Brothers, but I have a feeling I won’t be fooling myself for long.
