The idea phones are distracting seems to be uncontroversial. I’m sure plenty of schools have policies limiting use, and after Covid these might be even more important. But I’m wondering what Dopers think of the article below, excerpted in the following post.
Excerpt
If you are over age 25, you have a fully mature frontal cortex to help you resist temptation and maintain focus, and yet you probably still have difficulty doing so. Now imagine a phone in a child’s pocket, buzzing every few minutes with an invitation to do something other than pay attention. There’s no mature frontal cortex to help them stay on task.
Many studies have established that, despite schools’ rules against it, students [check their phone] a lot during class, and that they receive and send texts if they can get away with it. Their focus is often and [easily derailed] by interruptions from their device. [One study] from 2016 found that 97 percent of college students said they sometimes use their phone during class for noneducational purposes. Nearly 60 percent of students said that they spend more than 10 percent of class time on their phone, mostly texting. Many studies show that students who use their phone during class [learn less] and get [lower grades].
…[One study] aptly titled “Brain Drain: The Mere Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity.” The students involved in the study came into a lab and took tests that are commonly used to measure memory capacity and intelligence. They were randomly assigned to one of three groups, given the following instructions: (1) Put your phone on your desk, (2) leave it in your pocket or bag, or (3) leave it out in another room. None of these conditions involve active phone use––just the potential distraction of knowing your phone is there, with texts and social-media posts waiting. The results were clear: The closer the phone was to students’ awareness, the worse they performed on the tests. Even just having a phone in their pocket sapped students’ abilities.
The problem is not just transient distraction, though any distraction in the classroom will impede learning. Heavy phone or social-media use may also have a cumulative, enduring, and deleterious effect on adolescents’ abilities to focus and apply themselves. [Nearly half] of American teens say that they are online “almost constantly,” and such continuous administration of small pleasures can produce [sustained changes in the brain’s reward system] including a reduction of dopamine receptors. This shifts users’ general mood toward irritability and anxiety when separated from their phones, and it reduces their ability to focus. That may be one reason why heavy phone users [have lower GPAs]. As some neuroscientists… [recently argued] “Smartphone use can be disruptively habitual, with the main detrimental consequence being an inability to exert prolonged mental effort.”
But smartphones don’t just pull students away from schoolwork; they pull them away from one another too.
The psychologist [Jean M. Twenge] has found a global increase] in loneliness at school beginning after 2012…
Too late IMO.
If the article’s logic is to be accepted we needed to have prohibited anyone under 25 from possessing a phone from about 1995 when they first got past being just voice calling devices.
As an example cohort with n=1 in 1995 I was age 37. Supposedly well old enough to handle such dangerous tools. Wrong. Utterly wrong.
I got a sorta-smart phone about then. And of course ever smarter smartphones since. My current companion would have been unimaginable in a warehouse-sized package in 1985 when I was just out of grad school.
This succession of infernal engines of destruction has rotted my brain almost completely in the ~30 years since. I now have a short attention span and no self control when it comes to phone-mediated interruptions. So maybe we should not be prohibiting phones for young age groups, but prohibiting phones for anyone everywhere of every age.
As a teacher, I fall into the “time and place, time and place” crowd. During class is not the time to have a phone in your hand. There is no actual need to be as Pavlovian as so many of my students are if they do not have the phone in their hand. And all of the usual excuses are just that: excuses. They are not receiving phone calls from their parents for an emergency. The students are checking WeChat and all the other social media accounts they have, playing games, and watching videos.
Time: Before school & after school.
Place: Not in the classroom.
Remembering myself at that age I’m certain that I’d be unable to put the thing down unless forcefully separated (I graduated HS in 1995 so I was still early even in the pager era at that age). Not having children I have no dog in this fight but if given a choice I’m not against it, during class at the very least.
From my experience in a middle school, I firmly believe two things about student phones:
A) Students and the school community would be better off without them.
B) It’s impossible to ban them unless you want to devote most of the school day to enforcement.
We took a middle way, from necessity. Students weren’t allowed to have their phones out at all during the school day. If they were caught using them, the phones would be confiscated and stored in the office until the end of the day (at the teacher’s discretion, they could be kept by the teacher until the end of class). If their phones were turned in to the office three times, a parent had to come get it and we’d give them a copy of the policy.
Kids claimed to need their phones to check the time, as calculators, and to receive important messages from parents. They actually used them to play games, to take and share videos (especially of fights), and to cyberbully their classmates. Parents wanted kids to have phones because at middle-school age, they were often walking to and from school alone for the first time in their lives and many of the older ones were going to an empty house after school.
Phones probably are bad for kids, but they aren’t going anywhere.
It’s not going to destroy the planet but is it going to be a planet worth living in if you have a load of breezy people who go around saying yaka-wow? Is that the society we want?
That was the rule before–same as any other electronic device. It didn’t work out. Parents want their kids to have access to them.
Too late, the genie is out of the bottle. You would need the full support of the parents and you are not going to get that because they can’t put their phones away either. And after the school boards suffer through all of the complaints and protests you won’t have their support either, once they can point to declining grade scores and increased absenteeism, they will cave under pressure.
If you try to take the phones away from the students they will claim anxiety attacks, they need their phones because it is like support animal for them, they will get a note from their doctor. They will just stay home.
I just retired after 12 years working at a young adult job training program and I really, seriously believe that most of the students could not function without their phones, they could not think of anything else, could not make it through the day, and most of the staff couldn’t either.
This issue should have been addressed years ago but it is too late now.
But good luck trying.
Count me as one more who wishes they could be banned but knows it would be very difficult.
It’s very practical. On no-bus days, she has to be able to call and say, “which parking lot are you in?” When rehearsal ends at unpredictable times, we wait for the call “I’m out, can you come and get me?”
My older daughter’s middle school actually does a pretty good job of banning them during class. The younger one (elementary school) isn’t supposed to have one at all, but is one of the majority who carries one for emergencies. She has to keep it in her pack, and the teachers don’t bother any kid whose phone stays out of view.
IANAT - how hard is it to just say that while class is in session, your phone stays in your pocket and on silent no matter what? Doesn’t seem to me like it would be any harder to enforce than any of the things we weren’t allowed to have out during class in my day.
Expecting a message? You can check it between periods. Your parents might need to contact you urgently? They can call the front office. Need a calculator? Here’s a Casio solar-powered calculator that’s been in this school district since 1987, the 8’s a little sticky but it works fine. Need to know the time? There’s a clock on the wall - you do know what the big and little hands mean, right?
My kids are grown, but if their school banned them I would be beyond livid.
Besides, kids are using their phones for good also aren’t they? Like taking notes or audio recordings of the teacher so they can refer back to it later when they’re doing their homework?
ETA: also, I’ve seen the videos of teachers behaving badly on YouTube and TikTok. I’m glad they had their phone to document that nonsense so people can be held accountable.
It’s hard. The answer to any question starting with those words is “it’s really fucking hard.”
I once commented to a colleague that if you bet me a hundred bucks that I could leave my cell phone untouched in my pocket for a week, I’d probably lose. At some point I’d check it without even thinking about it.
It’s worse for students. For many of them, especially the ones I worked with, their phones were safety blankets and totems. Forcibly separating them was anxiety inducing.
Worse yet, this is one of those “lose more” issues. You need strong executive function to avoid letting your cell phone majorly distract you. At-risk kids tend to not have those skills. They’re going to be more inclined to be distracted by their phones and they’ll respond worse to having them taken away.
At-risk kids are also more likely to have legitimate reasons to be anxious about keeping their phones handy: because they have kids of their own, or a job that contributes to the household budget, or family with serious health issues, or friends who got shot at last night and are laying low today.
Wireless earbuds and smartwatches have made it even worse. You can text and make phone calls and bounce around on your Spotify even if your phone is in your bag.
It’s a mess. If it were legal to set up a cell phone jammer in the classroom, I would’ve done that. Instead I had to settle for a big charging station at my desk to incentivize leaving devices with me, and inevitable confrontations with kids who couldn’t handle not being on their phones at all times.
My personal opinion is that it’s better for absolutely everyone if phones are not allowed in the classroom at all. For many kids, especially at-risk kids, letting them hold them but telling them not to use them is setting them up to lose. Just one more way to get in trouble, one more referral on the record, one more reason to hate the educational system.
As I understand it, that’s how it’s already done in many places. But that doesn’t address the distracting effect of merely having a phone.
Or they will make real attacks.
The job of being a teacher is already very difficult. It is already hard to find good teachers to fill all of the positions. They are underpaid and under appreciated. Open to liabilities and their job is managed, by their superiors in the school and the parents and, and, and…
Now, add cell phone security guard to their responsibiles. Every day they will risk getting punched in the face for taking a cell phone, or just get shot. Tell them they need to lead by example and that bringing their own phones to work will invite disiplinary action. How many teachers do you have now?
There is no going back to an age when cell phone use could be controlled. Manage them as best as you can, which is probably very little, and learn to live with them.
Phone should be banned in class because students should be paying attention to what they’re supposed to be learning. I’d support jamming the signal if that’s what it takes.
It shocks me that phones are allowed in class. Back in the day, teachers prohibited eating, gum chewing, talking to your neighbor, passing notes… And children were taught to follow rules, time/place/manner restrictions, that the world did not revolve around them… Not clear to me why phones are different.
The level of emotional trauma in schools is unbelievable if you’re not in schools every day. I’m not using the word “unbelievable” idiomatically. So many kids today completely lack executive function in the way that kids without this level of trauma possess.
Policies that rely on individual teachers telling student to put phones away are laughable. Teachers can’t get students to stay in the classroom. While I’m generally skeptical of state-level control, I’d support a system that installs cell phone jammers in classrooms, coupled with locked-down Wifi access. Offices need to be fully staffed such that emergency communication can happen through the office, just like it happened twenty years ago.
Students don’t need access to cell phones during the day. What they need is a learning space without that distraction.
I defer to your expertise.
Perhaps we should plan to segregate the kids lacking executive function from those who do have (age-appropriate) executive function. ISTM the latter are greatly disserviced by sharing a classroom with the former.
My utterly non-expert view is the inmates and their parents have taken over the asylum. At great cost to the healthy majority upon whom we should be placing the greatest emphasis.