A general distraction
Just fancy, being tethered to a phone all day every day isn’t good for the intellect.
PISA finds that students who spend less than one hour of “leisure” time on digital devices a day at school scored about 50 points higher in math than students whose eyes are glued to their screens more than five hours a day. This gap held even after adjusting for socioeconomic factors. For comparison, a 50-point decline in math scores is about four times larger than America’s pandemic-era learning loss in that subject.
Never mind. AI will do the math for us.
Screens seem to create a general distraction throughout school, even for students who aren’t always looking at them. Andreas Schleicher, the director of the PISA survey, wrote that students who reported feeling distracted by their classmates’ digital habits scored lower in math. Finally, nearly half of students across the OECD said that they felt “nervous” or “anxious” when they didn’t have their digital devices near them. (On average, these students also said they were less satisfied with life.) This phone anxiety was negatively correlated with math scores.
There are other surveys.
Studies have shown that students on their phone take fewer notes and retain less information from class, that “task-switching” between social media and homework is correlated with lower GPAs, that students who text a lot in class do worse on tests, and that students whose cellphones are taken away in experimental settings do better on tests. As Haidt, a psychologist, has written in The Atlantic, the mere presence of a smartphone in our field of vision is a drain on our focus. Even a locked phone in our pocket or on the table in front of us screams silently for the shattered fragments of our divided attention.
One could stop right at that “students who text a lot in class” – why are they even allowed to do that? Is it because they could be taking notes and the teachers can’t be checking everyone all the time? Or because everyone’s just given up?
Oh well. AI will do our thinking for us.
Distraction and distractability are confounded factors here.
When I was in my doctoral program, most of my fellow students said this…except AI was computers. We’ve become lazy. I learned the math. I still don’t own a smartphone.
As for why they are allowed to text in class? I have heard a lot of teachers saying ‘how can you stop them?’. Easy. Say “put your cellphones away until class is over”. If that doesn’t work, take off participation points. If that doesn’t work…I don’t know, because I’ve never had any problem with those working. I guess if that doesn’t work, you could say ‘put your goddamned cellphones away”. ;-)
Teaching college, I found students had developed a lot of bad habits in high school. Texting in class, cutting and pasting papers from Wikipedia, using phones to do basic math (some of my students had to whip out their phone to multiply by one!). Also, not turning in homework on time, because teachers always gave them extended time. In college, a lot of us don’t…well, maybe not anymore. I was taken to task about my only late policy being ‘late work is not accepted’. Since I was about to retire, I thought ‘fuck ’em’ and kept my late policy.
We have a hard enough time keeping people off phones at my factory, despite people being fired for it (basically everyone uses their phones for music, podcasts,and audiobooks, which is acceptable); it really cuts into productivity particularly when watching YouTube and sports. Even I’m guilty of it time to time, mostly when I want to look up something mentioned in a podcast/book (and I’m not immune to refreshing this page). Getting away from the bloody screen is difficult.
Gulp. I feel seen.
So today we have learnt that sex trumps gender identity in sports performance, and that students who don’t pay attention in class don’t learn as much as the students who do pay attention.
I’m applying for a grant to enable me to run a study on whether people who go out on sunny days get better suntans than those who stay indoors.
I think that the teachers have trouble enforcing the idea of “no phones” if the schools don’t back them up with a policy that requires pupils to “check their phones.”
Back when the phone companies charged for texts I was shocked to get a phone bill for $1700 for my daughter’s texts. In school. I took away her phone, of course, and also switched phone company real quick before the current one reported me for non-payment of a bill. They eventually stopped collections when it came out that phone companies have no costs on texting. This was in the early 2k years.
Eeeek. Good lord.
iknklast
Back when I was young, we’d would look up the number in a table of logs, then add zero – by hand, mind you – before doing the reverse lookup in the log table again. Plus, we had to apply some mental gymnastics to place the decimal point right afterwards. Such hard work! Kids today have it too easy.
We also had to hike miles in deep snow to school, and it was uphill both ways. But that is a different story.
Mike, it’s tough even when schools do have a policy on phones. The school where I once taught (until August), they do have a cell phone policy. They don’t enforce it. Now it’s even worse…teachers are being told they should find ways for the students to use their phones as part of their class work. I know at least a couple of teachers who had students text their answers; they didn’t have to say a single word in class, they could just send a text.
I got a lot of push back because I don’t text. “You should be available to the students!” First, I checked my email at least twice an evening; they could email me. Second, teachers should not be available to students 24/7. It leads to needy, clinging students who can’t do a damned thing on their own, and it exhausts the instructors, because students are likely to text you at two o’clock in the morning. Seriously. That happened to a teacher I know, and she got in trouble because she didn’t have her phone on and beside her while she slept.
If teachers become available 24/7, an already poorly paid profession will be pushed down below minimum wage, if you calculate the hourly. Because no one is proposing paying the teachers more for this 24/7 hand holding.
@2 my policy on late work, attendance, etc. used to be what I’d consider reasonable in a workplace, and I’d tell my students that. In your job, what do you do if you’re sick/your kid has an emergency at school/your car breaks down/etc.? How and when do you communicate this information, and to whom? What accommodations is it reasonable for your employer to make? How do you ‘make up’ anything you’ve missed? What happens in the workplace if you submit something late? If you wouldn’t be able to do it at work, you wouldn’t be able to do it in my class. (I personally thought this was good training for them for how they’d be expected to behave in actual employment.)
I work retail; most of our staff is under half my age. And yet, somehow, they’ve managed to acclimate to the idea of not using cell phones on the job. Not saying that there weren’t exceptional cases of non-compliance, or general lackadaisicalness. Just that these have never struck me as being any more common than they were back when I was working in the summer as clean-up crew in an Elk’s Lodge.
Yes, the constant phone use has negative side effects; it also has positive ones, and I’ve yet to see any definitive proof about which outcome is more impactful in the long run on quality of life. My best friend has two teenage daughters, as addicted to their electronic devices as any of their peers–yet somehow, despite this, they’ve both managed to earn their way into a magnet school for math and science, and are thus hotly targeted by technical colleges as they enter that grand search.
A friend who lectured at a university did manage to forbid her students from having smartphones in class. She does, though, have a strong personality. She was also a very late adopter of smartphones herself – which I found exasperating for making arrangements, rendezvous etc.
@#8
“When I was a Lad” by Frank Hayes
A number of states in Australia have taken the decision to ban phones from school classrooms, including mine. At my child’s high school, students are issued with a pouch, and must turn off their phone, place it inside, and lock the pouch before entering school grounds in the morning. The locking and unlocking devices are powerful magnets, I think, and are kept in lock boxes attached to the metal fence. They’re only open before and after school.
What a good idea.