Classes have started and once again we can look forward to annoying beeps or electronic versions of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” or the “William Tell Overture” interrupting a lecture or exam.

Often times, simply walking from one building to another is enough to discover the weekend or evening plans of many students. Last minute pre-class studying with a cup of coffee at Counterculture in the College of Arts and Sciences building is akin to finding a quiet moment in a Nokia commercial.

It is beyond debate that cellular technology has been a boost to existing businesses and has become an industry of its own. It has proven beneficial in emergencies and is making the pay phone as much of a relic as the typewriter.

But please keep your cell phone out of the classroom.

Instructors should, if they don't already, set strict rules, not excluding a sound- proof box positioned outside the room. Many professors ask that phones be turned off at the beginning of class, but invariably someone fails to check their phone or seems to feel that a call from a child, marriage partner or other acquaintance is important enough to interrupt class. A singing phone disrupts thought processes and exiting the room to take the call disrupts the whole class.

And it is exceptionally rude.

It is enough that we must endure listening to the obnoxious rings and conversations of others on the streets, in restaurants, stores, theaters and even funerals—the same phone twice during the funeral of a 20-year-old woman killed by a drunk driver. Both times the man who owned the phone, a relative of the deceased, waded through sobbing mourners to the funeral home lobby to take the calls.

Exceptionally rude is an understatement.

In his 1998 book “Civility: Manners, Morals and the Etiquette of Democracy,” Yale law Professor Stephen L. Carter writes of technology and its effects on civility.

“We tend to think of our phones as labor-saving devices, increasing the efficiency of both our business and personal lives. What we tend to leave out, if we even notice, is that our love affair with the telephone almost certainly has made us less civil.”

A friend has a habit of calling from concerts and holding his phone toward the stage. If you think Rod Stewart sounds bad live you should hear him on an answering machine recorded from a cell phone held above the crowd at the Sullivan Arena.

I now screen my calls.

Carter also alludes to the invasiveness of the telephone.

“The telephone caller invades unasked into the privacy of the home, and yet it is the one who is called who, if refusing to talk just then, is considered rude”

Cellular phones have a place in society. That place does not include classrooms.