Every time I go to write a blog post I sit down with full intentions to go from start to finish without distractions. And every time I am dead wrong. I find myself often getting writers block and so I turn to my phone instead of sitting there stuck thinking. With this discussion being about cellphone usage I want to do some calculations while I write. Every time I go on my cellphone, I am going to put in brackets how ever many times I’ve gone on my phone in total like this (#). We’ll keep track together how many times this happens. Also, I know that sarcasm can be difficult to communicate through text, so for clarification on the title it was just a joke. This will not have any scientific merit, but I do think it’ll be fun. With that out of the way let’s get into the discussion (1).

As with a lot of the discussions in this class I think I have a little bit of a bias in the sense that I’m not a teacher, so I don’t see the impact of these aspects of technology in the classroom. The same goes for cellphones. All I had to go off of was my experience as a highschooler, and now the experiences that were shared during the debate. I can definitely see the frustration that a cellphone in class can have on a teacher. It has to be one of if not the most obvious distractions that can take place in a classroom, but it’s not the only distraction. Students can spend class time drawing in their notebooks, they can be day dreaming, they can be talking with their friends, etc. Would we take away their pencils and paper? Would we keep their heads always pointed towards the textbook? Would we put them in little isolated cubicles to remove the potential of non-class related discussion? Obviously not. These are all extreme measures that would send a horrible message to kids. It would essentially be saying they can’t be trusted; they need to get back in line and do as they’re told. Que Pink Floyd’s Another Brick in the wall music video

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Those examples may have been a little over the top, but I truly think that banning cellphones is along similar lines. It’s a drastic step to try and eliminate one of an endless number of classroom distractions that can occur (2). Especially when factoring in that it’s not even guaranteed to work. I’m not sure who said it in the chat, but it was mentioned that sometimes when we don’t have access to our phones it’s all we can think about. Wondering if we’re missing something important or when we’re gonna get it back. Even just missing the convenience of being able to look something up in seconds (which is something students can and do take advantage of in every other situation where they’re allowed to use their phones). It just seems silly to me to say “Hey! You can’t have this thing that is 100% fine and acceptable to use throughout the rest of your life”.

Now like I said I’m looking at it from a biased perspective, so let’s try to balance that out a bit. First off, before even getting to the readings, it is obviously disrespectful for a student to be on their phone while a teacher is giving a lesson. This is common courtesy in any situation. When someone is talking to you the screen stays down. Seeing it happen day after day, hour after hour in a classroom setting, I’m confident I’d flip to the other side and start saying we should just ban the phones. I can remember many of my teachers telling the class “Listen to these instructions because I’m not saying them again”, and then one or two students inevitably going up the teacher 15 minutes later and saying “What are we supposed to be doing right now?” (3). If you can pinpoint that the reason they didn’t catch the instructions was because they were on their phone then that phone is going to seem like the bane of modern education.

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I was surprised during the debate and when watching There’s a Cell Phone in Your Student’s Head to find out that seemingly the further away a student is from their phone the better they perform in school. I honestly wouldn’t have thought it’d make a difference, but thinking about it more it does make sense. The further away it is the harder it will be to access and thus there should be less of a mental need for it to be checked. Also, as an adult I think I’ve forgotten just how many notifications high school students get. I ran the numbers in Too many texts: Cellphone experiment shows impact on learning a little further. The math works out to each student receiving almost 22 notifications during the class, or simplified further to 1 notification every 1 minute and 49 seconds (4: I just used the calculator app to run these numbers, but a teacher wouldn’t know that’s what I was doing). I’d say at least once a day I check my phone to see if I missed a notification only to find out there’s none. If I was a kid and knew I was getting that insane number of notifications found in the experiment, I don’t know if it could leave my mind.

While I’m still not on the side of banning phones I will say that removing them from schools should hypothetically remove that constant itch that they need to be checked, not just because they’d be unable to check it, but assuming most of their friends go to the same school those friends wouldn’t be able to check it either. None of their friends would be sending them texts, posting on social media, sharing a TikTok with them, or anything of the sort (5). I think the FOMO would die down in that situation (6). But what might keep that FOMO around is if they see that despite this ban their teacher is still using their phone.

It doesn’t matter if a teacher is using it to text a family member, text another teacher about class plans, or just check their lesson plan on their phone. A kid is going to see that and feel like they’re being treated unfairly. Students could be using their phones for similar innocuous reasons, but no matter who it is in the classroom, when someone is seen on their phone the assumption is they’re goofing off. In Kyle Sledge’s Should Teachers Be Allowed to Have Cell Phones in the Classroom? He advocates the importance of teachers having their phones in the classroom, and I genuinely thought during the 2^nd and 3^rd paragraphs that at one point he was going to pull an M. Night Shyamalan style twist and say that he was actually advocating for students to have their phones. I went back and read those two paragraphs after and replaced each mention of teachers with students and vice versa, and honestly it reads almost the exact same.

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I’m paraphrasing here but it essentially said: Teachers may have a sick relative and want to stay updated on the situation without other people hearing about it. Teachers should keep their phones away during instruction. The number of times they go on it can help determine things like work ethic and behaviour. If they’re reported for using it too often they should be told to change, or be punished.

Can the same things not be said about students? I just couldn’t quite see Kyle’s point, but perhaps that’s why it was a reading given by the disagree side (alongside of course the professional modeling for how to use a phone in a class). (7)

9 Reasons Why Cell Phones Should Be Allowed was a quick summary of all the best aspects of cellphones in schools. That said I wish they would’ve just made the video longer and included all the point instead of making me go in the video description and read the rest on their article Why Cell Phones Should Be Allowed in Schools. And honestly some of their best points are in that article.

For example:

• It prepares students for the future where they’ll need to be familiar and proficient in multiple technological tools.
• It can help with accessibility and provide accommodations to students with learning differences so that they’re given an equal opportunity for learning.
• It allows them to learn digital etiquette. Clearly it’s annoying in class when a student uses their phone, but wouldn’t it be better for them to learn in school that they’re being disrespectful instead of in the workforce where they could end up getting fired for it?

I think that last point is my favourite. The topic came up during the debate of the “hidden curriculum”. I hadn’t heard of this term before, but I could piece together what it was about as soon as it was said. Teachers are not just there to educate students on math and English and science and history, they’re also here to educate students on how to be successful in their future. This should fall on the parents as well, but for most kids, teachers are the second most influential group of adults in their lives, even sometimes accidentally being called “Mom” or “Dad”. So, I continue to feel awful whenever I say this, but it’s yet another responsibility teachers have to try to take on. I mean even in the Too many texts video (As a reminder this was a video provided by the side saying phones should be banned) they say that banning phones in schools is the wrong approach. Stating that “Since smartphones are part of our world, we need to help kids better manage the technology, not the other way around”.

Since starting this blog post I have checked my phone 7 times. Honestly, I thought it would be way more because typically it has been. Maybe it’s that we’re near the end of class and I feel a greater sense of urgency to ensure the final few graded aspects of the class are finished on time, or maybe it’s that I was more aware because I was tracking it. Regardless, I couldn’t avoid checking it and as a result it’s led to the same points that I wanted to make when I had the idea. First, I took several other distraction breaks while writing. Grabbing myself a snack, taking out the garbage, playing fetch with my dog, etc. If I didn’t have a phone these other distractions would still exist, and I bet I’d have found a way to create more. Second, and this may be controversial, but I don’t think distractions are always a bad thing. As I mentioned at the start of this post, I turn to my phone when I get writers block. Sure I could power through writing, drain my mental energy, and eventually spit out a mess of words I’d feel wasn’t up to the quality of writing I expect from myself. But why do that when I can take a second away, give my brain the chance to process what I’ve written, recharge by doing something that requires less brain power, and come back ready to write again. Distractions can be harmful of course, but sometimes they can also be a positive. If used in a way where they’re not being distracting to others, I don’t see why cell phones in the classroom can’t work, but that’s not an ability students possess by default, that’s something that needs to be taught.

(8)