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.
I don’t think throwing any amount of links at each other is a particularly productive way of answering the question. I can just as easily find an equal number of reports from teachers saying how keeping kids off their phones is nearly impossible and makes it much harder to actually teach. Plenty of teachers would strongly disagree that social media is merely a ‘potential’ harm.