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:
I agree. A teacher having issues with cellphones is a classroom management or lesson engagement issue, not an addiction. A student will not even think about their cellphone if a lesson is engaging.
ReplyDeleteGood point. The best defense... I would never check my phone during a movie. Unless it was boring...
DeleteI encourage you both to become more educated.
ReplyDeleteIt really depends on the students and their motivation. I have taught at a school where my students were very motivated, they wanted to earn high grades and achieve success, and wanted to learn to understand new ideas and become smarter. Cell phones weren't as big of an issue in this school, because the students were motivated.
ReplyDeleteI have also taught at a school where students were not motivated at all. They did not care about their grades, and when I would contact their parents, their parents wouldn't care either. It was one of the saddest experiences I have ever gone through. It is very difficult to try to teach or encourage someone to care about something that they were never taught to care about -- including from their own parents. To these students, it is unlikely that they will ever be excited to learn, no matter how hard you try to make the material exciting for them. In these classes, cell phones are a major issue, because there is nothing you can do to make them care. I have had kids get ISS for cell phone use per school policy, and their mindset was "Cool, now I get out of class for a few days." This made me not want to give referrals to kids for using their cell phones because I knew it would only send them to ISS, which would be removing them from the classroom and giving them absolutely zero chance to learn the material with the class. As you can see, it is a constant downward spiral and a very difficult classroom management issue to resolve.
However, my whole point of posting is this: I don't think we should criticize other teachers or their methods, since we don't know what students they have in their classrooms. If anything, we should be asking questions, offering advice, and helping each other. For the cell phone issue, there isn't one cure-all method. If there was, there wouldn't be so many posts about it. I think we really need to look at WHO is in our classrooms and WHY the cell phones are important to them. From there, we can try to find a way to make it so it does not keep them from learning.