Cell phones are everywhere – but educators are just tired of hearing about them and pointlessly trying to hide them, silence them, and even utilize them. But it just doesn’t work. Short of drowing the cell phones in a communial aquarium in front of the class, they are a given of modern teenhood.
They are rude. They pull you away and take you apart. They medicate and numb you. Got it.
In talking with the class today, we uncoved another price paid by the tie to cell phones. Teenagers (and soon adults) have lost the skills to “flirt.” No longer do we need to practice the subtle skills of gestures, body language and words to do the deed. We use the cell phone. I looked back over the year we had of improvisations and writing and indeed agree that all the scenes that involved “flirting” quickly went to overt sexuality. Predictable and unimagitive – flirting become an obvious wink of the eye or wiggling of the chest or hips.
Gone are the days when the term flirting had an infinite number of subtitles. Gone are the days when we tried to master communication based on body language. We certainly have some very fancy ways of communicating but so few possibilities. If a generation cannot flirt with interest – how are they ever going to act with possibilities.