It varies. Some schools ban them outright, but others just have a "don't use it in class" policy. A few actually make the students check in their phones when they get to school, like they're gunfighters in a frontier town.

Yeah.. the latter just seems like a good way to get it stolen. I've heard stories on Facebook about workplaces that have the policy, and then the phone "mysteriously disappeared" or something. It's just a weird policy: personally, I wouldn't really complain if my server was texting on the job, unless it was really slowing down service. Kids always find a way around these things anyway. I guess that raises another question: we NEEDED to get a TI-84 or higher at some point, and those things were expensive. I think more expensive than a smartphone given you're on a plan actually (especially adjusted for inflation.) You could try to rent one from the community college, but this was in PUBLIC SCHOOL. So a lot of kids didn't get to take Trig and Calc because of that, classes I reluctantly took myself. The irony of course is that you don't necessarily need a calculator to do any equation. It was mostly laziness on the teacher's part.

I didn't do that much research, but it looks like there's a TI-84 emulator for smartphones, which would eliminate the above problems. Thing is, I wonder what teachers would do then.. you know there's at least one really smart math kid who's thinking what I'm thinking..

That a 6 pool zergling rush is the only way to beat insane difficulty AIs?

I teach at a university in Oregon, and I have a strict no-phones-where-I-can-see-or-hear-them policy. I have only actually had to tell a couple of students to leave the class because their phone rang during my lecture or because they refused to put it away, but it has happened. So clearly some high school students are not getting the message about using them in class.

That said, once I finished my work in Pre-cal trig my senior year in high school (1997), I had about 10 minutes to play some Tetris on my buddy Dan's TI-90. It was allowed because my math teacher made it well known that he did not give a rat's ass what we did in class so long as we learned the fucking math and didn't bother him.

I also wasted so much valuable dating/fucking time during college playing the real Starcraft.

I never got into Starcraft even though all my friends did, and kicked serious ass at WC2. I was just like "ehh.. Warcraft in Space, huh?" What little I knew. I could've been a celebrity living like a King in S Korea.

@Mothership

Please don't tell me you teach at UO.

That's a big negative, yogarfield! I was at a different uni in Oregon, and I'm in Cali now.