I agree 100% on the age figures. Of course, my comment was a diplomatic response to the GGP post who argued "by college age the students are NOT adults and CANNOT make their own decision", which is off-calibrated by about a full decade.

I might argue that a student texting is pretty low-impact on other students in the room; say, equivalent to doodling on notebook paper. Compared to the possibility of disruption by striking up social conversations, perhaps texting is actually an improvement.

Do your classes have mandatory/scored attendance? I don't, and so that opens the pipe to truly-disinclined students to simply not be there at all, and fail on the tests like they were going to anyway. I've found in the last year that I've had much higher levels of discussion, and very enjoyable interactions, even in my remedial classes with the half of the students that are actually motivated to come to class and get engaged with the subject (irrespective of having cell phones accessible).

Good anecdote, thank you for that.

You need to come visit Earth in the 21st Century sometime. At least among the college students I teach:

- College is the time to practice, exercise, and test out being an adult. Yes it's fundamentally a safer and lower-impact space than elsewhere. If there are some failures along they way then they can recover and be used as learning experiences.

- Students are not having educations paid for by mommy and daddy; mommy and daddy are probably dirt poor or not in the picture. Student's education are being paid for by financial aid from the state (I think 80%) at my school and egregious loans.

- Phones are part of their lives even if they're not physically on the at all times. Most of my students have jobs, children, other family members they take care of, and expect to be available in case of an issue or emergency. Yes, this makes it much harder for them.

Frankly I say this as an lecturer who fought bitterly against having any phones out in the classroom for several years (points off, attendance penalties, etc.) Within the last year I finally surrendered on the issue because it was simply unwinnable and caused escalations up to and including physical threats against myself. Having relaxed that requirement, I've found that counter-intuitively it seems like less of a problem; students do seem to keep them available in a mature fashion, and actually fewer of them are challenging the rule by fiddling continuously with them. So that's just anecdotal, but it's been my pleasantly surprising experience in all my classes this year.

Smart people don't get defensive and make up silly stories. They use mistakes as learning opportunities to educate themselves better.

A half-dozen, no; 30 people, yes. The probability of getting all-KKK members is microscopically small, and is accounted for in the confidence level of the estimate. You simply don't know what you're talking about, and are making a classic perennial mistake of the uninformed, is all.