I learned today that some people attended schools where this was normal. The schools I went to only had phones in the office and the teachers lounge. What was your experience?
I have one in my room currently.
Not in elementary school, no. Some of my highschool teachers had phones on their desks or in their offices depending on what they did.
They weren’t landlines, though. They were connected to an internal phone network.
How else are teachers supposed to contact the office?
A couple classrooms I was in had an intercom buzzer that either had it’s own speaker or worked with the rooms loudspeaker!
By going there? None of my schools had any communication line between classroom and anywhere else, except for networking in the computer rooms
Best we had was a buzzer that the teacher could use to communicate with the office. It’s kinda ridiculous looking back at it now. You’d think they would have had a phone system in place.
yeah I have seen the buzzer thing.
The teachers I had opened the window and shouted at the office
I was in school in the late 90’s through the Bush years, two different public school systems in the Atlanta metro. All classrooms had a landline phone, the office would call in sometimes or we could call them. There was also a two way intercom and the office would spy on you or just become a voice in the sky
Yes, in classrooms and they should still.
Kinda? You had to press a code to dial out, otherwise they were only good for calling the office or other classrooms.
It wasn’t a land line but connected to the school switchboard. You had to go through the office to get an outside line because students would use them if not.
No, but out of the unusual we had TV and Radio coax connectors in every classroom.
Painted over and unusable, of course.
No, people would just walk over
None of my schools had phones in the classrooms. We had intercom systems that the teacher could use. A speaker on the wall with a button to press to call the front office and another to press when speaking. The only phones I knew of were in the front office and in the teachers lounges.
We did. I only saw it get used once or twice a year, usually to take a call from the front office or the school nurse. There was some internal numbering scheme and a certain prefix for calls to outside numbers.
The announcements also went through the same kind of phone used in the classrooms. Source: was appointed as the announcer for a year.
Addendum: If it wasn’t a private matter, the front office just paged the intercom speaker of the recipient classroom. The teacher would yell back into the speaker and it was a good day if one of us students were allowed to reply instead.
Both the schools I went to and the schools I have taught at had landlines in the classroom, as well as some in the lounge and the main offices. They were all real big on parent teacher communication so that might have been a reason why.
At my university, professors had phone lines, but only in their offices. In my lower education, there was a main office with administrative assistants that would handle messages for the teachers.
We did have the classic intercom system, and the main office could page a teacher if something urgent was going on.
