If there’s something strange in your neighborhood, who you gonna call? Well, if you’re a teenager, absolutely nobody, since you’re probably too scared to use the phone.
Luckily, there’s a class for that. As reported by the BBC, England’s Nottingham College has launched a course to help young people overcome their telephone phobias.
The college’s careers adviser Liz Baxter shares, “Phone anxiety is something we come across regularly,” especially for a generation that grew up texting to communicate instead of calling.
“It’s normalized for our generation to be used to text messages,” says 16-year-old student Donna. “So if there’s a phone call I always think it’s an emergency.”
“The only people I’ll call are my mum or my dad,” adds 17-year-old Eve. “But anyone else, I don’t want them to call me because it feels quite formal, and that’s not something I’m used to. It’s unknown to our generation, we’ve grown up texting each other.”
Among the ways the course hopes to alleviate phone anxiety is asking students to make simple calls to restaurants or stores to ask about opening hours or other similarly simple questions.
We assume they won’t be showing the Scream movies, though.