This would not be an issue if parents cared about their children enough to get them flip phones instead of smart phones. However, this is a positive step.
Gov. Mike DeWine on Wednesday gathered school administrators from around the state to discuss how they’ve instituted policies to restrict middle- and high-school students’ cell-phone use while at school.
Speaking at a roundtable discussion, superintendents spoke about how lunchrooms and playgrounds have been falling silent as students focus on their phones instead of each other. Kids use their phones to harass other students, set up fights, or skip class.
It is significant that DeWine spoke with superintendents. Principals consider it a feature that students are silent and sullen as they stare at their phones during lunch and study halls. North Royalton instituted a “Phones on Free Time” policy during my last year at the high school. Lunch and study hall periods were creepily silent.
Over the years, I have had supervisory lunch duty, never a study hall. Kids were active, going over to talk to friends at other tables, playing that dumb paper football game or arguing about something trivial. My role was to keep them contained in the cafeteria and limit the radius of chaos. Each table can be vigorously debating, but if they were arguing with another table, that’s bad.
Teachers who try to do something productive on cafe duty don’t enjoy it very much.
After setting up phone limits, they said, their lunchrooms are becoming noisy again, suicide assessments are down, and test scores are up (though cell phones are one of many factors influencing the latter).
Kids need unstructured time. Some will get rambunctious, but that’s how they figure out how to manage themselves. It’s gratifying that superintendents realize that a noisy cafeteria is a sign of good health.
“I think our students are happier without that cell phone,” said Diana Rigby, a Dublin School Board member. “They may not know it, and it’s our job to show them that we can get back to a point where classrooms are conducive to learning, students are active, lunchrooms are active, playgrounds are active.”
Most drug addicts refuse drug treatment even though it’s obvious that they are deteriorating. Social media and constant digital communication is bad for children. We are adults and are supposed to know what is best for them.
I don’t know why they keep mentioning playgrounds. Playgrounds are an elementary school thing.
However, there is little research so far about the long-term effects of school phone bans, and school phone bans are not universally supported.
Child development and education research has always been very shaky. There is plenty of research to show that social media hurts children, particularly girls. Allowing smart phone use during free time is ignoring that fact and a dereliction of our duty.
No teacher’s lesson is so engaging that it wins over watching Youtube videos or texting. Permitting students to use their phones in class is disrespectful of the teacher’s time and ensures the student will learn very little.
A weak administration, like North Royalton’s, leaves it up to the teacher to decide policy in the classroom. That is just handing off the problem to the teacher, and hanging us out to dry when parents complain.
Teaching Physics, 3% of my job was keeping the stopwatches working. It was a great day when every kid could use their phone as a stopwatch. Phones can also measure the angle of a ramp, sound level, perform frequency analysis of sounds and display infrared light.
One year, at the end of Summer, a week before classes started, I stopped into school. About a hundred upperclassmen were standing around waiting to get their parking passes. Almost all of them were screwing around on their phones. They all know other people in the crowd that they hadn’t talked to all Summer. They seemed socially dysfunctional. Phone use, without specific permission, was banned in my class.
I explained the policy to parents at Open House.
“Your child is socially dysfunctional. I’ve seen a football player, a BMOC, standing next to a cheerleader, and both of them are texting. Your kid has no game. You will never have grandchildren.”
I explained my policy and the reason for it. No parent ever objected, but a couple have said, “they were probably texting each other.” Which could be true. Most of my students understood that they weren’t normal.
My policy was that a phone could not be visible in my classroom without explicit permission. That sounds normal, but it’s more strict than they expected. Students expect that the time between classes belongs to them. If a student came into my class, I’d ask them to put their phone away. It didn’t matter if the bell to start the period hadn’t rung.
This policy took continual vigilance to implement. At first, it took a dozen reminders per period. After a few weeks, it would be a dozen reminders per day. Maybe once per year, a student was so hooked that I’d have to put their phone on my desk for the period. I never wrote them up or confiscated a phone. At best, I may only have to remind them a few times per day.
But DeWine, speaking to reporters after the roundtable, said he thinks there’s a consensus that school phone bans are beneficial.
“With the gain in students’ mental health and gain in students’ ability to learn, it’s certainly worth the effort to get this done,” said DeWine, adding that he set up the event to “shine a spotlight” on the issue of phones in schools.
The governor said there is no current effort to pass a law creating statewide limits or a ban on phone use at schools.
DeWine seems to have good instincts on this. We don’t need a law. How would it be enforced? After a year or so, he should revisit the issue and see how various districts are doing.
Parents may eventually figure out that a flip phone is sufficient.