Students and Cellphones, Together Forever?

For the first time in years, I had to confiscate a particular student's cellphone-- I've been trying to be diligent about getting the kids to put their phones in the caddy at the front of the room, but some of the kids smuggle them back to their seats, where they place them behind computers and book bags so that they can watch videos and do whatever teenagers do on their phones all-the-fucking-live-long-day-- or the screen addicted give popular rationales such as they need to charge the phone or text their mom or get a particular photo for a project that can only be accessed on their phone and then the next thing you know, they're on Snapchat or TikTok-- it's an exhausting battle and I wish our school would ban the damned things, especially since there is definitive research that phones are making kids dumber AND even if you don't use your phone in class, if someone near you is using their phone, it ruins your concentration as well-- I liken it to smoking-- not only is it bad for you, but it's also bad for the people around you breathing in second-hand-smoke-- and I certainly feel this secondhand effect teaching-- because even though I'm vigilant about not using my own phone in front of the kids-- I really try to set a good example-- but once I suspect a kid is illicitly screwing around with their phone (which shouldn't be on their person to begin with) then I lose concentration-- anyway, it usually doesn't come down to having to confiscate the phone-- that only happens every few years, but when it does, the student (who always seems to be female) inevitably flips out, cries, and curses at me . . . which is why this is such a hard policy to enforce because teens have so much emotional attachment to their phone-- once they freak out I tell them I'm not trained to handle this kind of emotional breakdown and addiction and they need to head to guidance for some guidance-- for example, and the student who had her phone confiscated once showed me that she does 16-18 hours of screen time a day on her phone-- which doesn't even seem possible and definitely requires some kind of professional guidance-- anyway, I get the fact that some teachers give up and don't enforce any kind of cellphone policy, because they're burned out and scared to face these kind of consequences-- but I'm trying to fight the good fight and maybe someday we'll get an administration that has done some reading on this subject and will just outright ban the things-- because they don't belong in school.

3 comments:

zman said...

So you make girls cry in class and respond with "I'm not trained to handle this kind of emotional breakdown"? This doesn't bode well for EBHS's Niche rating.

Professor G. Truck said...

i don't make them cry, Silicon Valley makes them cry

rob said...

not a sentence. i can read a sentence. but i use my phone a lot, so i gave up on whatever this was. i assume the ending was happy.

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