Cellphone Brain Disease: A Polite Disagreement

A fellow blogger wrote a wonderful and heartfelt post about students being addicted to cellphones and the trouble it causes.  I would like to politely and respectfully disagree (the original post can be accessed HERE.)

An addiction is defined by the government as a "brain disease".  I suppose our phones, or the absences of them, can affect our brains.  I know it affects my heart when I reach for my phone and can't find it.  But an addict?  An addict can also be defined as "an enthusiastic devotee of a specified thing or activity" by Google.

I accept.

I am addicted to my cell phone.  I take it to church; does that make me a bad person?  While my paper Bible is open, I am trolling my Bible app in search of more verses to study and am taking notes to look at later.  I have my phone when I am spending time with my family; does that make me a bad sister, daughter, auntie?  I catch the most adorable moments with my addiction (I put them at the bottom of this post.)

To tear a child's work up, literally, because he was looking at his phone makes me wonder two things:  What if my boss tore up my work? What does that teach? (Because kids will learn from our actions before they ever learn from our words.) And the other question is: why are we giving tests that can be Googled?  That's not testing skills.  That's testing content. The ability to regurgitate.  Which no one can do better than Google.  I wouldn't even try.

I have been in classes where cell phones weren't an issue.  How?  Because the teacher had taught them how valuable they can be in class.  I am right now writing from my laptop and my cellphone is next to me.  Need to spell a word? "Hey, Siri, how do you spell immunoelectrophoretically? Actually, I just asked her what the hardest word to spell was.  She gave me a list of the top 10.  She's so smart.

You know when I check my phone?  When I am bored.  Stop boring your students.

I realize we cannot make it our sole purpose to entertain them every minute of every day, but you know what we could do?  Teach them the value of a moment.  Teach them when to capture a snapshot and when to put the phone down and simply take it all in.  Instead of teaching kids that cellphones are the devil and are rotting their brains and are not to be used in class, how about let's teach them the difference of a cellphone used at home and a cellphone used at school. Let's teach them the excitement of inquiry, the wonder of wondering, let's make it so they are so busy learning that the only thing they are snapchatting is the awesomeness of their own discovery.

They are growing up in a completely different world.  Instead of forcing our ideas on them, let's force them to come up with their own ideas.  I bet they will surprise you; they do me.

And now for adorable family moments caught with the use of my cellphone:

 

Would You Like a Spoon?

"I know you don't know how to do this because we have never done it before."

This was a teacher to her students during a math lesson.  I believe two things to be true: 1. a quarter of those students already knew how to do it and 2. another quarter could have figured it out if they had been given 5 minutes.

But they weren't.  Their spoons were taken and bite by bite they were fed the steps, the procedures and the lesson.

It's hard for teachers to let go of the "I Do" in gradual release.  Many believe this is where we must start because we are the holder of the knowledge.

But we are taking their spoons.

"Oh, they can't read cursive."

How do you know?  Have you ever give them a passage in cursive to see if they can figure it out?  My 6 year old nephew opened a birthday card that was written in cursive and read it aloud to everyone.  Why?

Because no one had ever told him that he couldn't read in cursive.

It's like the fable of the bumblebee; it flies because it doesn't know it can't.  My 10th graders used to cry: We can't read in cursive! Please, besides the F, B, Z and an occasional Q, the letters are easy to figure out.  And I write in prursive (print-cursive).  But they thought that because they were not taught to read in cursive, they could not read in cursive.

A bigger sin than refusing to hand over the spoon to let students tackle, solve, grow confidence, is taking their spoons when they offer them to you.

There's a class I work with regularly and they want to be told EVERY. SINGLE. STEP.

Take my spoon!  Feed me!  Take away my responsibilities, the chance I could be wrong, the chance of making a mess!

And we take the spoon.  Willingly, even eagerly, because we know we can do it better, faster, smarter and with a lot less mess.We take away their opportunity to problem solve, to create another wrinkle in the brain, to create new pathways of information and understanding.  To discover.

It's hard to watch kids struggle; it's hard to watch anyone struggle.  But that's how we learn.  It's how we grow.

They will stop offering you the spoon eventually.  Because they will have so much confidence, they will know they can do it themselves.  Let us provide not knowledge, but opportunity, because that is what truly separates the haves from the have-nots.