Cell Phones in Schools; or How Modern Schools are Anything But.

As a teacher, I often watch quality ideas and golden opportunities fly by like a $100 bill  blowing across a busy highway. For a number of years while teaching middle school, I was told to arrange students’ desks in groups of four rather than rows. I refused. I kept them in rows, and I intended to keep them in rows for the entire year. My plan was to teach my students the different modes in which they would learn: individually with their focus on me and/or their own work (rows); collectively as a whole class with their attention on me or another student in front of the class (rows); and collectively in small groups with their focus on their group’s objective. However, the mandate/command came down from on high with little thought to implementation. “Just do it” is as far as thinking about implementation went. I was told to get my desks in rows. The compromise was I had until the end of the week to get the desks in rows. I tried to explain, to show I was trying to implement the district’s wishes, that I in fact agreed with the push for collaborative work and group seating, but that our students did not sit quietly and work on their own. They needed to be taught. Even with threats of punishment, cajoling, and outright bribery, they very rarely sat down to work. Putting them in groups put the greatest temptation – another student – in front of students too young and ill-trained to deal with it. You don’t need an education degree to see the folly in that.

I was reminded of this wasted opportunity, and many others over the years, when I saw this headline:

Cellphones gaining acceptance inside US schools: https://apnews.com/28f7490db4af49ab81c38cf2f852aa87

My first reaction was “It’s about time!” My second reaction was despair over the participle form of “gain.” In a society in which cell phones have gained acceptance, our schools, a pillar of our society, have rejected them. If there’s any universal, timeless truth about schools, it’s that what’s in society will be present in the schools. Banning cellphones in schools is tantamount to banning cars in society.

This issue has got me thinking about rules, punishment, and those that decide them both. When I was a child, I remember things being referred to as “bad.” Not finishing your peas was bad. Not hustling on a ball field was bad. Some kids were referred to as bad and we full well knew what that meant. I grew up in a time when black and white still reigned, when good and bad didn’t bleed into one another, and people had a clear choice to make. Choose good over bad. Because bad was bad and there is no redemption from such a label. Growing up and on into early adulthood, I didn’t think much about this distinction. It wasn’t until I heard my parents refer to my son running like any 5-year-old will do around the vacation house they rent every year as “bad” that I saw that maybe this is a worldview and not just an introductory way to teach a young child about right and wrong. That maybe the childishness of “bad” remains in an adult even when they should be dealing with the complexities rather than the simplicities of “bad.”

Cellphones are a way of life. In such a short time, they’ve gone from novel, space-age magic toys to the thing you grab along with your keys and wallet before leaving the house. According to the Pew Research Center, 95% of American adults own a cell phone. 77% own a smart phone (that’s a lot of flip phones still out there) (http://www.pewinternet.org/fact-sheet/mobile/). That’s over 238 million adults in American who have a phone. Then there are the kids. Take a walk outside, pretty much anywhere in America, and you will see people with cell phones. I wouldn’t be surprised if you went to some remote national forest in America and found a person there on a cell phone. They’re everywhere. And we’re on them all the time. One statistic estimates that Americans spend 5 hours a day on their cell phones (https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/03/u-s-consumers-now-spend-5-hours-per-day-on-mobile-devices/). 5 hours. Besides sleep and work, what one activity do we do for that long? While what one can do on a cell phone varies, the fact remains that the devices are integral to our daily lives.

Unfortunately, many school leaders are blind to this. They’re blind to any complexities beyond a simple right/wrong. They are blind to the effects of their polices because they are more concerned about checking off a box and “doing” their job. They are no longer Toys R Us kids (I guess we all won’t be soon, but the point remains). When an adult grows up and forgets what it’s like to be a kid, they lose empathy and therefore view children as “bad” if they’re breaking the rules. Adults don’t think about the effects of the rules on kids; they’re concerned with creating and enforcing rules to fit only their version of the world. A principal is more concerned with meeting the requirements of the job than with meeting the needs of children. A teacher is more concerned with meeting the requirements of the job than with meeting the needs of children. This attitude is present in many other areas of life. In religion, we are sinners who must pay for our sins instead of receiving help with our weaknesses. In our society, “they” are addicts who willingly take the stupid risk of death to get high instead of people with different weaknesses who need help with them. Rules aside, if people don’t live to our expectations, then we condemn them. Maybe the problem isn’t kids determined to skirt rules, but rulers that create rules that accomplish unintended consequences.

The educators mentioned in the article, Superintendent Brian Garverick and Principal Jim Freund, are Captain Hook from Peter Pan, the disconnected adults who must punish those they don’t understand. Just look at their language. Garverick focuses on texting and cheating. Freund judges the students’ maturity level. They focus on what’s wrong with the kids. Kids. Kids who need to be taught what to do. Kids who are in schools run by people like this who look to people like this to teach them what they need to do to be successful in this world. While adults struggle with using phones in healthy, beneficial ways, the kids are immature. What then are the adults?

This is a dereliction of duty by those entrusted with our children’s education. It’s willful ignorance to not accept the ubiquity of cell phones. As the article mentions, even little kids have them. It is pure stupidity and abdication of authority to think banning them does anything to solve the “problem.” Banning abdicates responsibility because it assumes the ban is a self-sustaining solution. In fact, a ban requires repeated investment since a ban does not on it’s own contain the mechanism for enforcement. So when an administrator bans something, they’re merely checking off a box in a list of accomplishments that give the appearance of doing their job. In fact, they are undermining those under them and creating greater problems that go unchecked because they can show off their check-the-box ban as problem solved.
Just as adults need help with using their phones, so do children. I’d argue more so because they are children. If there’s an etiquette to cell phone usage – say don’t phub (an actual word combining phone and snub) someone while at a restaurant or don’t use it to cheat on a test or don’t show disrespect to the teacher by turning your attention to the more interesting phone- then teach it. What are Garverick and Freund doing in their schools to teach their students how to use this ubiquitous technology? Nothing. Instead, they are sending students into the world not with applicable skills but with missed opportunities.

There are countless ways in which cell phones could be used in the classroom. In districts like mine which struggle to pay the bills, having computers for each students is a wish that will never come true. The computers I have in my classroom, which are there for a special class meant to get kids reading on grade level, are old and slow. When a monitor recently broke, the IT guys said sorry, we don’t have any more. My district cannot provide computers for its students. But we have students providing computers for themselves. Nearly every student has a cell phone, a basic hand-held computer. A student could research and write an entire essay and turn it in to the teacher from their phone. The internet, so commonplace now, but a mind-blowing achievement of collected human knowledge, is available in a small, portable device. Textbooks, primary sources, videos, audio: the list is as endless as the internet is. I’m having trouble understanding why an educational leader would turn down such a godsend resource like the internet.

I can hear the response now. Cell phones are distractions. Kids just play on their phones. They use the camera, Air Drop, and various apps to communicate under the teacher’s radar. Did you know them younguns can take a picture of another student’s assignment and copy it!? Those terrible, evil children.

It takes time, effort, and human resources to craft, implement, and maintain a cell phone policy that utilizes phones in the classroom. An educational leader who forgoes the time, effort, and human resources needed to allow students to easily access information lacks intelligence, leadership qualities, originality, creativity, and courage. They are brainless cowards who because of their static ineptitude bar students from an educational opportunity. In our advanced, scientific, technological society, the main driver and sustainer of those things – schools –  is stuck in the grip of bad ideas, outmoded thinking, and fear.

Ready Player One: A Book Review

I am not obsessed with the 80s, and I liked this book.

I am not a big video game player, and I liked this book.

I do not enjoy someone explaining playing a game over playing it myself, and I liked this book.
In fact, I’m more critical of the 80s than most, and there’s a part of me (that I try not to listen to, too much) that thinks 80s freaks like Ernest Cline are a species of roach, at once interesting but at the same time discomfort-inducing. So what, you watched a lot of TV as a kid. I view people obsessed with pop culture from any time period as navel-gazers who need to expand their horizons much the same way a religious person who only reads the Bible.
But I liked this book.
I liked it because it was a page-turner. One of the greatest reading thrills of my life, now and since I was a kid, is buying a paperback at a supermarket or a drug store and flying through it. It’s cool water when I’m dehydrated. It’s a warm dinner when I skipped lunch. I can’t get enough and the actual ingestion is the reward. But what struck me as different about this page-turner is that Cline is essentially describing someone playing a video game. And I couldn’t get enough. It’s like going to a friend’s house to play video games and instead of playing, he tells you play-by-play how he beat the game last night. It shouldn’t be possible to make the telling just as exciting as the doing. But Cline pulled it off. As with any book, especially one as long, there were some slow parts and some parts where the action didn’t jump off the page. But these were the minority, and most were quickly swallowed up in a few pages by revitalized adventure.
I also liked this book because I like experiencing other people geek out. Even if it’s over something I’m not into. I enjoyed being overwhelmed with the references. As I read at breakneck speed, I had little time to consider just how difficult it is to integrate so much information into a story. Perhaps if I went back into the book and read it slower or read certain passages slower I’d see the strings or the exposed zipper on the costumes, but that’s not how one should read this kind of book. I dove in and swam luxuriously in the excessive 80s. I respect anyone with a lot of knowledge, and I feed off the energy that comes from someone geeking out over their vast store of knowledge. Even if that knowledge is useless (hence the irony of a story about gaining immense wealth and power by simply playing games).
There’s much to criticize with this book. A book about an all-pervasive internet that acts like a drug for the oppressed people of the world should include criticisms of that system that echo our own. Cline wasted a huge opportunity to craft his story to show the dangers of a far-reaching internet. He did, in a way, but that part of the story – the Sixers, etc. – didn’t have teeth. It wasn’t the point. The reader is swallowed up in 80s nostalgia, perhaps mimicking the stultification caused by Oasis in the book. That’s an interesting idea, but I don’t think it sticks. So much can be read into this book (a reason it’s so popular), but I’m not sure the book can sustain any stretching beyond what it is. It’s a book written in our time period for our time period, something meant to be quickly ingested, quickly digested, and quickly absorbed as a form of happiness. For what it is, it was a good book.