How the way that different grades communicate with each other has changed

Back in the day, the only ways to talk to people were through the phone, passing notes, and face-to-face confrontation. It seems today, however, that “talking” to people just means that you send them a message online. Devices and social media can be useful tools, but they may be negatively changing the way students communicate. From time to time students will be on their phones or computers talking to their friends, even though they may be sitting next to each other.

This trend has been noticed by teachers and students alike. Physics teacher Matt Palubinskas, being one of them, has seen this occur.

“[I see] many students facing each other, but not looking at each other… they will each be independently on a device.” Palubinskas says that if he wanted to talk to someone when he was a freshman in 1981, he had to wait until he saw someone to talk to them if he didn’t have their phone number.

Students say that there are a lot of ways to connect with others besides face-to-face contact, and utilizing these allows them to connect with their friends more.

When sophomores need to get in touch with each other, they “have a Facebook group and a Schoology group,” sophomore Charlie Cobb said. Cobb says that rather than telephone or face-to-face, he communicates with his classmates using social media whether it’s school related or not.

Senior Lajhaya Lewis-Harrell said that the way she communicates with her friends has changed. Lewis-Harrell used to use social media to keep in touch with her friends.

“Now, I text a lot more and see them in person,” Lewis-Harrell said. Along with most of the other students, Lewis-Harrell says that social media is used for connecting with all of her friends while face-to-face is reserved for close friends.

Language Training teacher Devin Wooten was a freshman in high school in 1998, where he says that the closest thing to text or social media that he had were chat rooms.

“You had to log into chat rooms so it wasn’t one-person to one-person,” Wooten said. According to Wooten, the chat rooms or a landline phone were the only ways to talk to your friends when you weren’t at school.

While most of the older students use Facebook and text, Schoology is popular in the freshman community. Not only is the site used for checking grades and due dates, but it has become a way for students to stay in touch and share ideas.

Freshman Zubin Abraham-Ahmed is the creator and admin for the Schoology group “Writer’s Space.”

“Basically people come to [Writer’s Space] to share their pieces of writing and to bounce ideas off of each other,” Abraham-Ahmed said.

Not all of these Schoology groups, however, are as academic. Some are there to take a little stress out of your day. For example, there is Random Trivia 2.0. The basic premise of the group is that there is at least one trivia question per day on anything from history to “Star Wars.”

“We have six to ten [posts per day],” freshman Alexander Lewis said. Lewis is the founder of the group and is in charge of general upkeep. Along with fellow administrators, Lewis strives to make a small break in everyone’s day.

Whether it’s face-to-face, Facebook or Schoology, the students at U Prep all have unique and efficient ways to interact and communicate with each other.

By: Micho Matuszewski