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"Does your teen send a gazillion text messages every day? Or does it just seem that way? One-third of teen texters send more than one hundred texts per day. A study conducted by the Pew Research Center indicates that cell phones have become the primary means of communication for today's adolescents. Roughly 75 percent of twelve- to seventeen-year-olds own cell phones, up from 45 percent in 2004. The majority of US teens (72 percent) use text messages to communicate, and more than half of teens (54 percent) text daily. For a whole generation of teenagers, texting has become the norm for casual communication. According to the Pew Research Center, 59 percent of girls and 42 percent of boys text friends several times a day 'just to say hello.' Indeed, text messaging outranks talking face to face with friends (only 33 percent of teens do this in a typical day), e-mailing friends (11 percent), or even having conversations with friends on cell phones (38 percent). Naturally, texting has filtered into the classroom, causing many schools to limit the use of cell phones, to restrict calls to emergencies, or to ban them altogether. Still, 40 percent of teens text in class, 17 percent of in-class texters report that they do it 'constantly,' and 22 percent report that they have texted answers to classmates who were struggling to answer a teacher's question. Of course, for generations, students have passed notes, created elaborate codes, and devised ingenious ways to communicate without being detected. But texting creates a near-instantaneous and easy-to-hide option that already has its own ever-flexible language. Cyber cheating is just the latest in a long and glorious tradition of kids trying to pull a fast one on the grownups. But let's not be so quick to put the blame for excessive text messaging on our teenagers . . . two-thirds of them reported that their parents texted them during the school day!"