By: Kirk Tran
Imagine a horde of shambling, drooling, brain-dead students roaming the open-air campus at our beloved MHS. Zombie epidemic? Nay. It’s just the everyday consequence of the proliferation of the allegedly “smart” phone.
If my readers can’t tell—no doubt due to the pernicious influence of the aforementioned “smart” phone—I greatly disdain that mind-numbing monolith of our society. “Smart” phones do nothing but make us dumber, and as such, should be far more closely regulated on campus.
I know the Ten Commandments order us not to take the Lord’s name in vain, but I swear to God, pedestrian traffic during passing period could be so much better if people just walked without looking at their phones. The problem is exacerbated during rainy days because people, especially those with the short end of the height phenotype stick, like to carry their umbrellas at my eye level, almost blinding me through their ignorance. If not for the “smart” phone, I believe students would not be so ignorant, so socially unaware, so unbelievably inconsiderate, or so dumb.
Another way “smart” phones make us dumb is by distracting us. I have seen so many of my peers—not that I’m innocent, either—dawdling about on their phones when they were supposed to do something more important, like doing assigned classwork or paying attention. Then they have the gall to complain about boring or poor teaching.
Is checking one’s latest plastic Korean boy crush’s social media so pertinent? Is it absolutely necessary to sniff out the latest and funniest memes when there are more important things to be done? No and no.
What happens when people pay more attention to their phones than their instructors’ lectures? They cheat. When people don’t pay attention in class and are confronted by tests and quizzes and assessments and what-have-you, they cheat. How do they cheat? By using their phones, of course!
I remember a particularly brazen boy in my sophomore English 2A class cheating on a vocabulary test, of all things, using Quizlet. How did I know he was cheating? He accidentally played audio from the vocabulary list he was cheating from! Talk about asinine. This is the sort of idiotic behavior that is birthed when phone use is not heavily policed.
Cheating is even worse in foreign language classes because kids usually only want to learn the language for college credit. The sad thing is, people who cheat on their phones usually do worse than people who actually study. It’s disappointing that “smart” phones should encourage such lazy, stupid cheating.
“Yes, yes, phones have downsides, but think of all the upsides.” I can almost hear dissenting readers right now. “What if there’s an emergency call from a student’s parents in the middle of class? What if a student needs the phone for emergencies during long walks home after school?”
Neither of these are particularly intelligent reasons not to crack down on phone usage during school hours.
Students can’t leave class in the middle of family emergencies anyway—such actions must be approved by the office. If a student truly does need to leave class, most of the time the office will phone her teacher to fetch that student and transfer her to security, and the student will learn what pressing issue there is soon enough. If the student does not need to leave class, he or she does not need to be distracted by such issues throughout the school day.
If a student needs her phone on the way home from school, then the phone should stay in her bag. Needing a phone after school does not mandate the use of phones during school hours.
Open carry of “smart” phones has a negative effect on learning at MHS without any upsides. I honestly think they should be regulated more heavily. Heck, I’d even support the confiscation of all phones used during school hours.