By: Jonathan Tran
There is a right and wrong time to use phones, whether at home, school, or work. MHS, similar to any high school, exhibits numerous downsides of extraneous phone use by its students. However, students should not be taught to cut phones out of their school lives entirely, but rather how to use them responsibly and intelligently.
The rapid integration of technology in the daily lives of Americans today is both undeniable and unstoppable. The smartphone is one of the cornerstones of this Information age we live in, and taking it away from students during one of the most pivotal growth stages of their lives is a wanton and unjustified move. Trying to teach students how to succeed in life without a phone is a terrible idea. If they go to college, they will have no idea how to manage their phone during class, and if they go into the workforce, they face the same issue. Regulation and its enforcement is the solution here. Are students always going to use their phones for something other than school? Yes. Is there any way to stop this? Of course not. But they are going to have to use a phone for the rest of their life, so MHS might as well try to set them on the right path before life whisks them away.
I seriously doubt the effectiveness or even proper enforcement of a complete confiscation of all phones during school hours. I’ve seen kids cheating on the SAT despite “all phones being confiscated,” so who’s to say it would even work on a larger scale throughout the school? What’s to stop a kid from saying, “I don’t have a phone” and then just pulling it out of their pocket the second a teacher walks off? Maybe we should put metal detectors at the entrance of every classroom so there’s no way a student could sneak one in. That may sound ridiculous, but it’s no crazier than trying to enforce a schoolwide smartphone confiscation.
Teachers should give an errant student a single verbal warning about their smartphone use and just start confiscating it after that. Make an example out of him so the rest of the class falls in line. If students are taught that their consequences have actions, the misbehaving ones will straighten out. The ones who use their phones at the appropriate time will never have anything to worry about because they never had that issue.
Smartphones are distracting. That goes without question. But it doesn’t matter what a student has on hand; if he is bored, he will find some way to distract himself. He will fiddle with his pencil, doodle on the desk; students have been doing this since before smartphones were invented. Instead, let the students who finish their work properly use their phone. That way, they learn that completing their work has positive results as well.
Most students need to communicate with their peers or their family. Whether they’re holding an emergency club officer meeting, being informed of a family emergency, or simply meeting up with their friends at lunch, students communicate and propagate information using their phones. The family emergency reason is the most critical, and I really don’t trust the office to notify me when one has occurred. Just a couple days ago, I had a last-minute emergency doctor’s appointment at 10 AM. My mom called the office to tell them she was coming by at 9:45 to take me, and they nodded and told her they would. They didn’t call me up to the office until 12. If she hadn’t texted me, I would have missed that appointment entirely. How could I trust the school to relay messages between my family and me after an incident like that? Full respect to the people in the office, but if there’s a family emergency, I’m not waiting around for the office to call me down and tell me. I’m leaving immediately and my family will excuse my absence afterward.
I use my phone frequently during some of my classes because I genuinely need it to succeed in the class. My Spanish vocabulary is seriously lacking. Most of my peers are native speakers who listen and speak the language at home every single day. How could I even hope to compete with students with lexicons that are literal years ahead of my own? Spanish dictionaries have become my best friend in that class. Could I use a physical book? Yes, I had to deal with that for a year when I didn’t even have a phone. That year was torture because the printed dictionaries were always slower to use and had fewer words than their online counterparts. Imagine the frustration I felt upon flipping to a page, realizing the book didn’t have the word I was looking for, and then watching the person next to me look it up in less than ten seconds on their phone. Regulate phone use. Don’t restrict it entirely.
Something that I can’t bear to see is a conversation between two people with one of them on their phone. That is downright disrespectful. When talking to someone, I put my phone down and look them in the eye to let them know they have my undivided attention. The same should go of students listening to their teachers give instructions. All it takes is a quick “Hey everyone put away your phones while I give these important instructions” from the teacher. Then the teacher can start taking phones if anyone still wants to try them.
Phones clearly offer a variety of upsides and downsides to anyone using them. These days, that happens to be everyone. These little glass and metal contraptions are here to stay and if we don’t teach students how to use them while we still can, students will be ill-equipped to handle them later on in their lives.