Samuel G Freedman
NEW YORK
Monday, December 24, 2007
HALFWAY through the semester in his market research course at Roanoke College last fall, only moments after announcing a policy of zero tolerance for cellphone use in the classroom, Professor Ali Nazemi heard a telltale ring. Then he spotted a young man named Neil Noland fumbling with his phone, trying to turn it off before being caught.
"Neil, can I see that phone?" Professor Nazemi said, more in a command than a question. The student surrendered it. Professor Nazemi opened his briefcase, produced a hammer and proceeded to smash the offending device. Throughout the classroom, student faces went ashen.
"How am I going to call my Mom now?" Neil asked. As Professor Nazemi refused to answer, a classmate offered, "Dude, you can sue."
Let's be clear about one thing. Ali Nazemi is a hero. Ali Nazemi deserves the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Let's be clear about another thing. The episode in his classroom had been plotted and scripted ahead of time, with Neil Noland part of the charade all along. The phone was an extra of his mother's, its service contract long expired.
Just as fiction can limn truths beyond the grasp of factuality, Professor Nazemi's act of guerrilla theatre, which he recounted last week in a telephone interview, attested to the exasperation of countless teachers and professors in the computer era. Their perpetual war of attrition with defiantly inattentive students has escalated from the quaint pursuits of pigtail-pulling, spitball-lobbing and notebook-doodling to a high-tech arsenal of laptops, cellphones, BlackBerries and the like.