Phone Bans & Freedom Stans
Or, How I Learned to Love a Well-Ordered Classroom
I’ve sat back and waited to say anything about the growing number of phone bans in schools across the US. I saw last night that the New Jersey governor is now hopping on the bandwagon.
Why? It’s an easy score for political points. Because we are all very well aware that smartphones are the cause of every societal ill in our current era, right?
At least, that’s what fearmongers like Jonathan Haidt would have you believe. I grew up during the “Satanic Panic,” and I’ve heard all of these arguments.
Remember from Battlestar Galactica: “This has all happened before, and it will happen again.”
I mean, in the 80s, it was heavy metal music and video games; in the 90s, we had more violence in film and TV that was to blame (along with music and video games), and the Internet as a whole became the target heading into the new century. Now, we’ve narrowed the blame to social media and kids having access to mini supercomputers in their pockets.
Maybe all of these “things” aren’t to blame for the craziness in our schools.
Maybe we just need classroom management while we have students in our buildings.
Maybe we raise our expectations of them to engage like human beings and not as lesser beings with no opinions or ideas.
Maybe we should raise our expectations of ourselves to create learning environments that are conducive to learning, not conducive to unmanaged madness.
I don’t think we have to lock everything down for students to learn, but our classes need some structure. Most of us manage more than two dozen students at a time, all requiring different things.
Your students can’t learn in an unmanaged, chaotic environment. That doesn’t mean that the work itself isn’t chaotic at times. It will be. Learning is messy.
We want our kids free to learn. But freedom doesn’t mean chaos. Freedom is responsibility. And, as many have said so many times before, your freedom stops at the point it impairs mine.
The same is true for our students. If you’re not doing anything about the chaos in your classroom, you impede learning, not the cell phones. Not the students using the cell phones.
Just you.
Go back and re-read “The First Days of School.” It’ll do you a world of good.