School Took Away Smartphones. The Kids Don’t Mind
wsj.com
wsj.com
The school did this as a response to a student live-streaming a fight. Banning phones is not solving the underlying problem there, it's just covering it up. It's not a big school, with only 57 students.
I also strongly dislike the continued narrative of pushing "dopamine" as an "addiction" that you control with screen usage. Dopamine system dysfunction most commonly presents as ADHD, it's not a bad habit that can be fixed. I understand phones become an easy way to escape and it becomes a negative coping habit for some, and it's especially important to teach teenagers how to address it, but pretending less screen time is always a good thing is a very pre-broadband internet mindset. It's not the direction modern society is headed.
It is infinitely better for engagement and student community to basically not have the phones out. This includes breaks and study periods.
All our students have computers, too, and I allow them to be out and used only very sparingly.
Basically, if you don't do this-- you either have students completely check out or need to dedicate >20% of your effort to enforcement. Students are less likely to socialize with other students outside of their preferred social groups. And all kinds of backchannel, terrible things happen between students during the school day in ways where you have much more trouble detecting and enforcing.
Yes, students will need to ultimately learn to moderate technology usage themselves. But we can at least ensure the school environment is productive and safe, and allow them some more prefrontal development before asking them to fully control an addictive device in ways that many adults struggle.
But on the other hand, I don't agree about a phone free environment being more productive.
The students that completely check out, often check out regardless of if there's a computer. Computers don't encourage that behavior, computers make it easier to hid it.
Teachers have always had a hard time detecting terrible things that happen. Even the school from the article, a very expensive, very small, low teacher student ratio boarding school had a fight break out between students.
I don't know if students are less likely to socialize with other students outside their preferred social group based on phones. I could argue that phones allow group chats and social networks of much bigger friend groups. The network will weigh a classmate you share a single class with equally to a classmate you share every class with.
It feels intuitive to blame phones as somehow causing maladaptive behavior, but if you include iPad and laptops into the argument, it no longer feels binary. Using individually assigned iPad and laptops have become as essential as textbooks were in the past. Even for middle schoolers, my school district has shifted to google classroom for assignments and digital textbooks.
I remember I was one of maybe a handful kids who brought a personal laptop to every class, senior year in high school. I was taking all AP classes except gym, so my teachers gave me the benefit of the doubt and weren't concerned about my work ethic. My calc teacher even introduced me to latex. Most of my notes were typed up that year. I know I would have had a much much harder time paying attention in calc if I was handwriting my notes. I didn't get distracted in classes just because I had a laptop, I got distracted when I was in a class where the teacher clearly didn't care about what they were teaching or when I didn't see the value in learning it.
Personally I am much much more productive working with some background music. Absolut silence and a phone/computer free environment makes it easier for me to lose focus. A caveat, I have ADHD, I know my experiences won't translate directly to the general population.
Unless you believe that students are objectively unable to learn how to self moderate technology usage, I see no point in delaying it. It's a skill they will need to learn at some point in their life. For those who struggle to learn it, the lesson will be much costlier in college. I believe that if it's normalized and introduced early, more students would pick it up quicker. I recognize this is ignoring the issue of how to build work ethic and passion to learn, those things aren't in direct control of a teacher.
I think there needs to be a different much bigger discussion on reorienting teaching and testing to be computer aided. Senior year, in physics I got to do a computer aided lab where I used a depth sensor to measure and plot the displacement of an object. From there it was possible to see the gravitational constant. That tangibility is so hard to get in physics and it would be impossible by hand.
It feels appalling to me that calculator/excel literacy is so poor for graduating high schoolers and undergrads. Part of it stems from an early association of the usage of calculators with cheating. There is no significant benefit in learning things like multiplication or division through rote arithmetic algorithms. Students enter a workforce where knowing hlookup, vlookup, and sumif in excel will cover 99% of the calculations they will need to do. But many of them graduate not understanding how to use a calculator and ratios to figure out unit conversion for things like baking.
It's fair to ask, how can teachers effectively grade students for take home assignments/essays in a time when students can use wolfram alpha or run a pre-trained GPT3/OPT models? I don't have an answer for that. But on the other side, standard teaching tools are showing their age. Textbooks are the worst examples. There are online programming textbooks that have embedded exercises where you compile and run code inline with the text and some algorithms even have interactive animations. Why don't we have the same for math exercises? 3Blue1Brown videos are prime examples of how much richer teaching and learning can be if technology is used properly.
That's simply not true in my experience. A substantial fraction of teenagers cannot control their temptation to interact when they receive a message. I lose otherwise-diligent students when they have laptops out.
Our environment got much more strict with device use in the past year, and my effort in classroom management has fallen by half and I'm getting better results. (Yes, an anecdote).
The remaining things I'm cracking down on are things that feel better to have around, like spontaneous conversations that are quasi-on-topic but disruptive, instead of a student just vanishing into a phone. The former is terrible, and the latter is engagement that needs to just be refocused.
> Personally I am much much more productive working with some background music. Absolut silence and a phone/computer free environment makes it easier for me to lose focus. A caveat, I have ADHD, I know my experiences won't translate directly to the general population.
Many students with disabilities have an accommodation permitting white noise or music when working in a silent room. I'm fine with this (though I do worry a little bit about test integrity).
> my school district has shifted to google classroom for assignments
I'm not at all complaining about digital communication with students and digital management of assignments. Instant feedback via a digital gradebook is very nice; being able to communicate by email with students keeps my office hours for the students who need them the most.
> I don't know if students are less likely to socialize with other students outside their preferred social group based on phones.
Oh, big text groups may be great outside of school. But, at school on a break, given the choice between watching Crunchyroll on a phone or talking to someone outside your close social circle, students will prefer Crunchyroll. The end result of this is that cliques become more insular and powerful.
> I think there needs to be a different much bigger discussion on reorienting teaching and testing to be computer aided. Senior year, in physics I got to do a computer aided lab where I used a depth sensor to measure and plot the displacement of an object. From there it was possible to see the gravitational constant.
Technology use in education can be great. e.g. I expose middle school students to linear regression in Desmos before they have all the tools to fully understand it mathematically, so they get the "gist" of fitting data. Also, Gimkit, etc, are awesome for formative assessment--- students get a "game" and I get instant feedback of students that need help and topic areas where the whole class is weak. And various simulations are very useful.
But it needs to be intentional. Most edtech is crap, and it comes with a lot of problems, too.
I'm glad to use technology where it makes sense... I'm also glad to teach e.g. computer architecture and machine language programming mostly with pencil and paper. I try to keep the "getting out the computers" rare and exciting, and a privilege so that students do not abuse it.
> It feels appalling to me that calculator/excel literacy is so poor for graduating high schoolers and undergrads.
We don't do much to teach Excel, but in my student population, literacy with calculators and computer algebra systems, etc, is very very high.
(I did have a bunch of students in my Spacecraft Systems Engineering class do a big time series model in Google Sheets with numerical integration to model power and thermal budgets... and our science classes do use Excel/Sheets a little bit... but much less than the calculators).
Maybe the difference between a typical classroom and my tutoring sessions is a student feels some sort of intrinsic motivation to be there and pay attention. Once the student has an understanding in the value of paying attention and actively chooses to pay attention, they are naturally able to have self control.
I appreciate you pushing calculator literacy. My school district is old school in both technology and methods. I know teachers that actively encourage using a ti84 over 89, so most people don't touch a real CAS. My go to party trick is still the solve() fuction. We have a very strong CS program, we have honors weighted classes in data structures, mobile development, and game development which has AP CS as a prereq. We also have AP weight classes for Multivar Calc, Linear Algebra and DifEQ which all come after AP Calc BC. The students are smart but the calculator literacy is just not there.
I think Excel literacy is the perfect bridge for getting students to start using database logic without a database. Index/match or vlookup are just constrained database queries. Once a student is able to connect their calculator CAS knowledge to excel, there are very few excel sheets they will come across that they won't understand. We have basic excel literacy because most AP science teachers expect typed lab reports, the exception is chem lab notebooks, there's usually one lab where there's some stat analysis and every lab requires some sort of graph. To me excel is the next logical step after mastering a calculator CAS.
Desmos is such a great tool, I haven't played with this specific feature too much but I am so impressed by the animation feature. https://teacher.desmos.com/activitybuilder/custom/6062093999...
Oh, sure, I never have problems with students using devices one on one, either. With a motivated student, social pressure from authority is completely on the teacher's side in such a situation.
If there's 18 students in the room, though... the chance of getting caught is lower. The student may have seen someone else just check a message in front of them before, normalizing the behavior. And the student may feel that they don't personally need to hear the second, alternate explanation the instructor is offering, and can check just for a second. (The big problem is the "just for a second" almost never is).
Re: calculators: lots of students are now using TI nSpire CAS or HP Prime (the latter is way better).
We have a fair bit of CS sequence beyond APCSA/APCSP, too. I'm not really teaching CS, though; I tend to take on bizarre, wildly-out-of-level things for the electives I teach-- teaching middle school students basics of controls or computer architecture or analysis of analog circuits, and high school students stuff that's usually graduate level material. All paced slower, and without telling them what they're doing is supposed to be hard. ;)
> Desmos is such a great tool, I haven't played with this specific feature too much but I am so impressed by the animation feature.
I love Desmos. I like the animate feature, but the regressions tool was the one I learned the most from. There's something magical about being able to see how much an outlier point is affecting the line of best fit by changing it on the fly and seeing the line/curve instantly update (which offers a degree of intuition beyond what you get from squinting at residuals).
My perspective is that for all current and future generation of children, removing them from social media will be harmful than helpful because of how isolating it will be. Some foundational social skills are now built online instead of outdoors. With the hypoconnectivity, kids today have to learn skills that adults today didn't need to earn. Anecdotally I gained an appreciation for online social skills when I got a smartphone the senior year of HS. I didn't realize how much I had been left out of things simply because I wasn't able to join social networks built on Snapchat and Instagram. Discord has become the main network for most kids now.
Are you allowed to carry any tool you want in school? If it has a real reason to be used in school then sure, but that's not the case for most student.
There are more students than teachers, and students are more likely to take cues from other students rather than teachers.
Leaving students to their own devices and hoping they make the right decisions would be an exercise in futility for class sizes over 15ish students.
The average speed of the available internet has increased exponentially since 1998. On dialup and even dsl, a 480p video is a struggle if possible at all, but over covid it became mandatory for home internet to support 3+ simultaneous video calls every single day, with some 4k Netflix/Youtube streams during lunch or for background music. My sister actually had to do a video call demonstrating a golf swing from her phone for online gym class. In 1998 99% of consumer internet speeds were too slow to stream an audio file in high quality without buffering.
Many middle and high schools have started using fleets of Chromebook for things like google classroom, textbooks, and submitting daily homework. Using computers isn't a special event that requires a class visit the computer lab. Everyone has adapted to these new trends for communication. It's fine to feel nostalgic and appreciate certain benefits in how things were in the past, but it doesn't make sense to apply the standards of 1998 to today's classrooms.
While I love seeing these stories about kids moderating their screentime and seeing the benefits, I worry equally as much as the early generations who grew up with an abundance of screentime (TV, Video Games, Early Internet).
I think all categories of screentime are considered addictions and I wonder if distance away from them for extended periods of time helps provide enough perspective as to how much value they actually bring to your life in comparison to other people or things that do make you happy.
Or, IOW: an elite, selective school comprised entirely of wealthy students.