Our local K school district just instituted a new rule restricting cell phone usage during the school day. I'm not familiar with all the details nor the consequences for violating the rule, but the spirit of the law is clear: Let's help students learn by insisting they put away their distraction engines during designated learning time. Frankly, I'm surprised school districts are only now pushing such measures. From my experience as a college professor, cell phones have been a major problem since , when, for the first time, the majority of Americans owned a smartphone.
I felt the shift viscerally as I walked through my small college campus in western Pennsylvania and didn't see any students outside enjoying the beautiful weather, lounging on the quad, playing guitars, or studying togetherβthe idyllic scenes from my own college days in the s. It hit me like a wave of nauseaβthey were all inside their dorm rooms glued to their cell phones.
I watched them morph from real people into online personas. They seemed checked out, lost, even empty sometimes. That year also saw a huge spike in anxiety and depression , students crowding campus counseling offices, demanding help. It was bewildering for us adults on campus to witness how quickly things had changed. Almost 15 years later, maybe the situation has improved in one regard: Students regularly write about how social media is making them sick, both mentally and physically.
Young college women are particularly susceptible to the bad feelings and sick bodies that result from consistent toxic comparison. My computer science students talk about the insidious nature of social media algorithms that drive compulsive smartphone use. Despite their awarenss, I'm not yet seeing the shift in human behavior that you'd expect.
For years, I've insisted on students putting cell phones away in class. It's really not an issue with my upper division junior and senior students who, somewhere along the way, learned to pay attention without being constantly reminded to do so. If they use their phones at all, it's quick and unobtrusiveβhow many of us might take a few seconds during a meeting to send an urgent text to a partner.
