If you call a cellphone and nobody is around to answer it, does it make a sound?
Staff and students at Victoria’s Central Middle School will be able to consider that question next fall. School staff recently announced that, starting in September, students’ cellphones and Wi-Fi devices will be banned from school.
This is the first outright ban on cellphones and similar devices in a Victoria-area school.
“We felt there was very little — if any — educational benefit in students having cellphones in their hands,” said principal Topher Macintosh. He said cellphones have a clear and detrimental impact at the school. “Many students have tremendous difficulty managing their use of cellphones and, because of this, teachers are finding phones a serious impediment to instruction and learning.”
Currently, students can bring devices to school, but must leave them in lockers. If caught with phones in class, students must give up their devices for the day and retrieve them after school.
“We’ll take five, six, seven cellphones a day,” Macintosh said. “The students just keep them in their pockets, and the temptation or the buzz is just too much for some of them, probably most of them.
“Kids were working quite hard to get on their phones for non-educational reasons.”
Some parents have expressed concerns with the ban. Although they agree students shouldn’t use cellphones during class, they say the devices improve the kids’ independence and safety.
How countless generations of students managed without cellphones is, it seems, incomprehensible.
University of Victoria language and literacy professor Kathy Sanford advocates kids be taught to better manage their use of the devices. “They’re not going away, there’s going to be more access, there’s going to be more of them, and kids need to learn how to use them appropriately and not dismiss them.”
Perhaps the lesson in the school ban is that it’s OK — appropriate, even — to leave your phone at home if you can’t guarantee you’ll use it appropriately, in the same way that people trying to quit smoking are encouraged to avoid situations that trigger their cravings.
In a 2013 survey of 6,000 Quebec students, one-third admitted they played games on school iPads during class, and more than 99 per cent said they found the devices distracting. In other surveys by the same researchers, even when cellphones were banned from classrooms, 95 per cent of Grade 10 and 11 students admitted to texting regularly in class.
The researchers said teachers should learn to integrate and better use mobile devices in learning.
“Good teachers will go around, move in the classroom, change things around, get students busy,” Thierry Karsenti, co-author of The iPad in Education: Uses, Benefits and Challenges, is reported as saying in the surveys’ media coverage.
While the droning-teacher meme goes back decades — Charlie Brown’s “wah WAH wah wah WAH wah” heard-but-never-seen teacher is an example — anybody who knows adolescents knows that even the most dynamic, most engaging teachers can’t compete day after day after day with a constant siren-call onslaught of peer-texting and online gaming.
Besides, isn’t teaching kids appropriate use of technology a parent’s responsibility — right up there with instilling manners and modelling empathy and impulse control? After all, parents dictate their child’s earliest exposure to and use of the Internet, and both set the tone and model the values the child will carry through.
Then there is the matter of how online devices affect the way young people’s brains develop. Studies suggest that too much screen time by youngsters can impede normal development of the areas of the brain that govern critical social skills, information processing, planning, judgment, impulse control, compassion, problem-solving, and task-related focus and performance.
If kids have endured regular and prolonged onscreen time from an early age, by the time they reach adolescence — a time of life not known for impeccable judgment in any generation — capacity for judging when cellphone use is appropriate might already be impaired.
Of course, we can always count on technology to provide a solution — even to the very problems it creates. San Francisco-based company Yondr has developed a locking cellphone pouch to help musicians and other performing artists control inappropriate phone use by audience members at concerts and other live events. At one Waterloo, Ont., high school, a teacher insists students place their phones in Yondr pouches at the start of every class.
If a student spends a class playing online games and texting friends, is she learning the intended lessons?
