In California, a high school teacher complains that students watch Netflix on their phones during class. In Maryland, a chemistry teacher says students use gambling apps to place bets during the school day.
Around the country, educators say students routinely send Snapchat messages in class, listen to music and shop online, among countless other examples of how smartphones distract from teaching and learning.
The hold that phones have on adolescents in America today is well-documented, but teachers say parents are often not aware to what extent students use them inside the classroom. And increasingly, educators and experts are speaking with one voice on the question of how to handle it: Ban phones during classes.
Yours is the first comment I see that thinks further than “phones bad, mkay”. Thanks for that. I am a teacher myself, and I don’t see the phones themselves being the problem, but the fact that the curriculum is totally outdated and irrelevant to this generation and the students know this. I have personally fought to get some ‘technology weeks’ (where I teach 3D modelling, animation and programming) and the phones stay in the students pockets for the entirety of those classes (without me telling them to!), because the subject is relevant, interesting and actually requires for them to think creatively instead of just memorising facts.
(: thanks. I’m studying to be a teacher in Europe but grew up with the standard SAT American educational experience. It was miserable and my whole life I was always “the problem student”, and I was “smart but never applied myself”. Learning about it now, I realize I was a kid that needed support that was outside of the standard, and my problems were caused by the system itself being an unbending machine. It’s really depressing to think how many other “problem” kids were in my classes over the years that were just trying to seek help but didn’t know how to express it and were completely failed by the system.