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I can remember it like it was yesterday, the day my parents finally caved and got me my first cell phone!
I was in 6th grade, and pretty much all of my friends and peers had already had cellphones for a while now. The majority of my friends had gotten their first flip phones in fourth or fifth grade, and I swear at the time it felt like I was the only one who hadn’t gotten a cellphone yet. I couldn’t wait to have a phone and I begged my parents just about every day to get me a phone.
I was constantly making power points and writing stupid little letters to try to convince my parents to get me a phone, but nothing seemed to change their mind. They felt that there was no reason for me at this age to have a phone yet. (It’s amazing how times have changed!)
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It was March 19th, my 12th birthday, and I couldn’t wait to open my presents the second I woke up. If I’m remembering correctly, my birthday had fallen on a weekend which was an amazing present within itself! The next thing I know my dad walks in holding a small box wrapped in wrapping paper. He gives me the gift and I ripped it right open. It was the one gift I had been waiting my whole life for, A CELLPHONE!
Now here’s where my troubles began. It was my first day back to school with my new cellphone and of course I couldn’t wait to show it off to all of my friends and classmates. Now this wasn’t any old flip phone like everyone else had had, this was the Rumor LG. It was this super cool blue and black cellphone at the time that slid up and down so you had the option of using a full keyboard or just the numbers on the front. It also came with phone skins so I could switch out the color and design of the back of my phone and it had so many more games than everyone else’s phones did.
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Well, as I was showing everyone my new phone and taking pictures on it, I neglected to remember that there were no cell phones allowed in school.
So, my first day of having my cellphone at school, I got it taken away. When you get your phone taken, they get sent down to the principal’s office, and the only way to get it back is to have a parent pick it up after school. Now I’m sure you could only imagine how my mom reacted to receiving the call that she would have to come in and pick my phone up from the office that was taken away from me during class.
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Well she got it, and guess what? I did not get that phone back too quickly. Of course she told my dad what had happened and I proceeded to get a whole lecture about why my parents had gotten me the phone in the first place, and that it is for making communication easier, not to use as a distraction during class, blah, blah, blah. I didn’t get my phone back until the next day, and once I did, there were some strict rules for a while. I was now no longer allowed to take my phone to school with me until “further notice.” I was devastated. It was so unfair.
Eventually, my parents allowed me to take my phone to school again, but this phone now became my parent’s main source of punishment. Anytime I did something wrong my phone would get taken away and it was beginning to get really annoying. I tried to act like I didn’t care in hopes that my parents would find a new form of punishment, but that only dug me into a deeper hole.
As I moved on to 7th grade, and 8th grade in particular, that’s when phones started to really become something that everyone had, and needed, and also started to become one of the biggest problems between students. Not only were kids constantly getting their phones taken away in class, but now is the time when the bullying began. While I never experienced any of this personally, I remember kids that did, and it even happened to two of my friends at the time. In 7th grade, the bullying mostly consisted of students sending nasty texts to each other and getting in texting fights. In 8th grade it got a bit worse. Pretty much every 8th grader at the time used some form of social media whether it be Facebook, Twitter, or Myspace. I think the two biggest ones at the time though were Facebook and Twitter.
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Kids in my grade would tweet mean things both at each other and about each other. One particular incident that I remember the most is when some of the boys in my grade made a Facebook page about a girl in our grade. Pretty much everyone in our grade had “liked” the page and people would post pictures of the girl or mean statuses about her. Eventually, the girl found the page and was devastated, and went straight to the office. Our school took this incident very seriously and the three boys that created the page got in a lot of trouble.
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A few weeks later I remember having an assembly about cyberbullying. This assembly really stuck with me and I still remember it to this day. We had a speaker come in and talk about what cyberbullying is and the effects that it can have on both the victim and the bully. At the end, the speaker played a short 5-10 minute film. The film pretty much talked about a girl who was a very well rounded, straight A student who was being cyberbullied. She didn’t tell anyone what was going on so no one could help her or do anything about it. This girl was bullied so badly over social media that she eventually committed suicide. At the end of the video, we found out that the girl in the video had been the daughter of the speaker. Chills went down my body, and remember looking around and seeing so many tears from teachers and students in the auditorium. From that day on, the cyberbullying going on in our school for the most part came to an end. Before going to that assembly, I never really understood how impactful technology could be in not only good ways, but in terrible ways as well.