A few weeks into my return to teaching part time this spring, I paused my walk around the classroom to watch two young women in body-con dresses writhe in unison to a song I could not hear. My student had an Air Pod in her ear as she held the screen for the women. I had to catch my balance after the internet took us out of class. Is that writing prompt where you got to? I wanted to know. He said, "Yes, one second." This is going to be finished just now. The school didn't have a no-phone policy and the teacher that I was visiting had told students to put their phones away during instruction. When I looked at the interaction in my head, it was clear that the student thought it was normal to use social media in class.
I knew teaching would be different after two years of remote and hybrid school, but I didn't think the role screens would play now that we were in person. I watched my students write over the semester. I could see them on both phones and laptops. It felt like home had arrived in class. A new normal of "post-pandemic" tech dependence was acknowledged by nearly every secondary school teacher I spoke with in the last year.
As a result, this summer, school districts from Virginia to Maine to California have enacted general cell phone bans. In France and China, there are restrictions on the movement of children and adolescents. The case for eliminating devices to create safe learning spaces can seem like a no-brainer given what we know about how phones and the social media they harbor can radicalize violence. If we want to prepare students for the messy, wider world, administrators need to put less energy into figuring out how to implement bans, and more into helping teenagers learn how to balance and focus.
Students are held responsible for their tech addictions, if not their parents, if they fail to enforce better rules. These are systemic problems and need systemic solutions. With a renewed investment in digital literacy, ethics, and well-being, we can shift our gaze of accountability outward.
During the spring 2020 semester, one of my students streamed class on her phone, holding my co- teacher and I at arm's length as she hid out in the quiet of her family minivan. She depended on the phone a lot for her learning. According to a Center for Democracy and Technology report, 86 percent of teachers reported that schools provided tablets, laptops, or Chromebooks to students at twice the rate prior to the swine flu.
The phone became a mini-classroom in this environment. Allison Cutliff, an English teacher in St. Louis, Missouri, says, "If the Chromebooks failed, it was like, 'What wonderful backup, you can just pop on Zoom on your phone,'"
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