When my main job was teaching at a university, the first thing I would talk about with students was our relationship with our phones.
This was easy for me. I was as addicted to my phone as any 18-year-old, maybe more. I struggle to put my phone down and have been reprimanded by my adult children at the dinner table.
Should mobile phones be banned in the classroom?Credit:Getty
But I knew that, while I was desperate to learn what new thing had happened in the world, what my students were doing was having D&Ms in their DMs. Way too distracting. So, we set a class rule. In a two-hour class, we would have a phone break in the middle of about 10 minutes.
Plenty of grumbles, but it was as good for me as it was for them.
I tell you this because schools are just waking up to the idea that having non-stop phone access is a terrible idea. And it’s not just bad for students, it’s also terrible for those who teach. In fact, child psychologist Michael Carr-Gregg, who led a 2018 review into mobiles in schools, is now advising schools to implement blanket bans on mobile phone use during school hours. He says the bans are “more urgent than ever” after years of academic disruption and soaring screen use during the COVID-19 pandemic.
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It’s not bad for teachers solely because students are distracted, but because teachers too are distracted.
There is a truckload of contentious evidence that says – or doesn’t say, depending on what you read – that mobile phone bans lead to an uptick in results. But that’s not really the problem. What mobile phones do to our social skills is the real problem. The most interesting person in the room is almost never the person to whom you are talking (unless it is your adored partner, your adored children and your highly adored grandchildren). It is hard for the majority of people to compete with a news feed, with out-of-control social media interactions and with surprising messages in your Instagram offering you ambassadorships for jewelery companies, the products of which you would never wear unless auditioning for the position of upper branch Christmas ornament.
I was so bored in a meeting once that one of my colleagues stormed out because I wasn’t paying enough attention to her droning but was, instead, attending to useful emails on my phone. I thought I was doing it discreetly. I was so very wrong. Everyone knows what you are doing, no matter how you try to hide it.