Texting has become second nature to teenagers across America. It is hard for all of us to believe that our parents had to grow up without the convenience of cell phones, which means they also had to grow up without texting. For today’s teenagers, growing up without a cell phone would be torture. How would we talk to our friends in class? How would we talk to our friends during a car ride? How would we do anything without our cell phones?

     Eighteen years ago in 1992, the first text message was sent and now texting has become an unavoidable subject among teachers and parents. Statistics from the Pew Research Center have reported in 2009, that 71 percent of teenagers, compared to the 45 percent in 2004, own cell phones.

     Cell phones and texting have come so far, yet adults still have misconceptions about it, but for school-related work, texting is not as terrible, as the professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Al Filreis, pointed out: “In writing, quantity tends to lead to quality and we’re doing quantity right now. My students are better writers than they were ten, twenty, twenty-five years ago.” Other experts still deny that texting is even remotely helpful.

     Even though texting has developed a bad reputation with adults, it has brought the same concerns instant messaging has in the past. Before texting was popular instant messaging was thought to be corrupting formal English, as texting is thought to be doing. There is no case of teens forgetting how to write formal English, so these concerns have diminished with instant messaging as they soon should with texting.

The Pew Research Center published that 50 percent of teenage cell phone owners use unnecessary punctuation and capitalization in schoolwork and 38 percent use texting abbreviations in school papers.

Students at North Montgomery believe that texting in class is a right and that they should be allowed to text whenever they want to.

“In the day and age, if you take a cell phone away from a teenager, it’s like carving out their heart,” Steve Hill, principle of Jefferson High School in Bloomington, Minnesota said.

Teenagers may feel that you’re taking everything they love away from them, but some teens feel otherwise. Students clearly understand the rule of no texting in class.

“I think the rule of not being able to text in class is a good idea because [texting in class] is part of the students’ problem of not getting good grades,” sophomore Rebecca Priebe said.

Opinions on texting range from the students to the faculty.

“[Texting] bothers me because it is disrespectful and rude. [Students] can not be paying attention if they are texting,” Mrs. Lough said.

In other words, everyone can live without texting their friends for an hour whiles their in class.  Listening to teachers wishes of leave the cell phone out of the classroom, unless they say otherwise, would be the respectful thing to do.