This Facebook post popped up in my feeds (thanks Johanna Bahnana):1
THIS IS EYE OPENING 😮 A teacher in the U.S. had her students turn their phones on loud, and every time they received a notification they went up and put a tally mark under the correct category. This was one class, one period. Every one of these tally marks is an interruption in a student’s education.
Cell phones can be toxic to a learning environment. (Thank you to Mary Garza for her FB post).
My thoughts: A couple questions… I’m assuming this is either middle school or high school. Also, were students allowed to reply to the messaging? Having spent the last three years of my teaching career with middle schoolers, post-pandemic, if they were permitted to reply telling the person contacting them that all messaging was being tallied would probably inspire them to message a 100 times more than they might otherwise message. Phone usage during class time is/was totally out of control, but I can also see how just doing this tally would influence the number of messages received. Especially with middle schoolers, I can see if word spread that messages were being tallied, students would totally try to game the numbers and increase messaging 100s of times, making the experiment horribly flawed (if one was trying to prove how often class was being interrupted by messaging and phone use).
There is a technology aspect to this problem, in that the algorithms used by social media are designed to keep users engaged, but the real problem is cultural/sociological in that we don’t actually value public education. Period. The problem isn’t phones. Having instant access is part of our world, valuing our time in the classroom by parents and students and the community (and business) is where we write it all off as just a big joke.
Classroom teachers are expected to give boutique expert level care and management to every single student who shows up for that one out of 180 days but then are supported like they’re just a cog on a factory floor that’s likely to be outsourced or shut down depending on the whims of corporate (district office). Phone interruptions are just one example of the cultural disconnect between what educators are trying to do and what the public doesn’t know or can’t imagine. The public is a bit like “corporate” in that they don’t want to be bothered by the details, assume that it’s all the educators’ responsibility to accomplish and expect a finished perfect product at the end of every school year. Ha! Then when things fail they fiddle with every knob and control, having no idea how anything works, and blame the educators when these changes don’t improve anything. Phones are a problem, but they didn’t just spontaneously show up in the classroom. A parent or adult gave the student the phone. And students aren’t going to do what they don’t see the adults around them not doing. You expect them to have the discipline to stay focused on one job until it’s completed, how often do they see you do that?
When I started teaching in 1995 I knew that classroom teachers had to be at least as engaging as the competition at the time, TV. So, I used as much multimedia in my lessons as I could and tried to make things as interactive and less passive as I could. But after 28-years I decided that I’d done all I could and walked away from a daily battle that I could never win. I was teaching robotic with LEGO and so many of my students couldn’t be convinced that any of this was worth doing. Many of them didn’t pick robotics for their elective, but what they had selected for their elective (music, art) was no longer available at my school, so they got dumped into my robotics class.
My last year I have four large storage bins in the four corners of the classroom where they were to put their backpack with their phones at the beginning of every period. It was a struggle every period of every day to get them to comply. Some didn’t bring backpacks (which I don’t know how that worked because they needed their chromebooks for every class) and therefore couldn’t store their phones. It was an unnecessary struggle. There was such a disconnect between what I was trying to do with them and what they wanted and there was no support or incentive either from the front office or from home that could shake it. So, I left.
2022-08-05 classroom backpack containers
I’m not shocked at the level of interruptions by phones in any one period. But the problem isn’t the phone. And the problem isn’t necessarily with the teacher. On one level the problem is that culturally we don’t know why we’re sending kids to school and what are our responsibilities as a community and parents to support the success of our students. Dropping them off on time every day is only the last step in the daily process, not the only step. Saying that the system is broken doesn’t mean that “education” has failed. As a culture, as a nation we only value public education as a patriotic platitude, but are mostly disconnected and/or disinterested in what it would take to rise above the challenges of offering public education to every child in the United States. I did what I could for 28-years and all I got was this little plaque. It’s much more than just taking away phones2. Personally, I think the students in the original tally gamed the numbers because in their minds bigger numbers means that they win. The sooner everyone learns how to leverage this ever present technology, the better. Good luck banning phones. It’s just another indication about how out of step a lot of educational decision-makers are with what’s actually happening in classrooms and how out of touch parents and communities are as far as what it’s going to take to be successful in educating our children. I did what I could.
Sources:
- FB post by Smart School House (2019-03-08), https://www.facebook.com/414174928617743/posts/pfbid0NvrmfTtsKzyieqvY4gXDreA1tyM5zEMnmwSMYrHBi9FKcwkVmg4hnvwk7QtfrGjnl/
- All images except the Period 4 interruption chart by Joe Bustillos
Tags: bad disruptive tech, cultural failure, not an education failure, phones in the classroom, tech in the classroom
JoeBustillos.com (website) by Joseph Bruce Bustillos is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
- I find it interesting that this observation was made or posted on March 8, 2019, one year before the COVID19 pandemic shutdown of most schools in the U.S. My observations were made once schools reopened and I had very few classes where a few students weren’t continually on their devices.[↩]
- If students had any sense of ownership of their own education they’d understand that there is a time and a place for our devices and the smart ones will navigate their way through this mess, while the rest will intentionally waste their time on what should be a non-issue[↩]
