A few weeks into my return to teaching part-time this spring, I paused my walk around the classroom to watch two young women in body-con dresses writhe in unison to a song I could not hear. The women were a few inches each, pixels on the screen in the hand of my student, who had an AirPod in each ear. The internet had yanked us both out of class, and now I had to catch my balance. Did you get anywhere with that writing prompt? I asked. Yeah, one sec, he said. Just gonna finish this. The school didn’t have a no-phone policy, and while the teacher whose classroom I was visiting reminded students to put them away during instruction, I had seen a rogue phone confiscated only once. Later, replaying the interaction in my head, what stood out wasn’t that this sweet and otherwise participatory student was on social media in class, it was that, in his mind, it was normal.
I knew teaching would feel different after two years of remote and hybrid school, but I had underestimated the role screens would play now that we were back “in person.” Over the semester, I witnessed my students write evocative, beautiful, surprising sentences. I also glimpsed them texting, gaming, Snapchatting, Instagramming, and streaming Netflix and YouTube, on both phones and laptops. If pandemic lockdowns had brought classrooms home, now it felt like home had come into class. Though policies around personal device use vary not only from district to district but classroom to classroom, nearly every secondary school teacher I have spoken with in the last year acknowledged a new normal of “post-pandemic” tech dependence.
As a result, this summer, school districts from Virginia to Maine to California are enacting general cell phone bans, while Michigan and Pennsylvania state lawmakers have introduced statewide mandates to do the same. Bans already exist for children and young adolescents in France and, as of last year, China. Given what we know about how phones and the social media they harbor can radicalize violence, harm mental health, and capsize attention spans—leaching our attention even when they are turned off—the case for eliminating devices to create safe learning spaces can seem like a no-brainer. But if we’re trying to prepare students for the messy, wider world, administrators need to put less energy into figuring out how to implement bans, and more into helping teenagers learn how to foster balance and focus while surrounded by the siren call of their devices.
Popular discourse holds students responsible for their tech addictions, and if not them, then their parents and teachers for failing to enforce better rules. But these are systemic problems, and they demand systemic solutions. It’s time to shift our collective gaze of accountability outward—not with a one-size-fits-all device ban, but with a renewed investment in digital literacy, ethics, and well-being.
During those dystopian months of the spring 2020 lockdown, one of my students streamed class on her phone, holding my co-teacher and I at literal arm’s length as she hid out in the quiet of her family minivan. For her and so many students, the phone was the thing her learning depended on. According to a 2021 Center for Democracy and Technology report, 86 percent of teachers reported that “schools provided tablets, laptops, or Chromebooks to students at twice the rate prior to the pandemic,” scrambling to democratize digital access when school went remote.
In this environment, any phone with internet capability became a mini-classroom. “If the Chromebook failed, it was like, ‘What wonderful backup, you can just pop on Zoom on your phone,’” says Allison Cundiff, an English teacher in St. Louis, Missouri.
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To ban that same phone now because it is also a portal to the rest of the world feels, at best, like an overcorrection, and at worse like an abdication of responsibility. Tess Bernhard, a former high school biology teacher and current PhD candidate studying the proliferation of K-12 educational technology, describes all-out personal device bans as “an extremely blunt tool,” one that feels like “a huge irony” given that while at home, students became acclimatized to using phones to submit assignments, communicate with teachers, and monitor grades.
Students are not the only ones who have come to see devices as a sort of reliable phantom limb. When teachers were forced to shift their classrooms online, many learned to appreciate the ease of a digital-first world. The teacher I worked with this spring told me she hadn’t passed out a single worksheet that required handwriting all year, saving her time in the copy room. All calendars and to-do lists were now on student devices. On my first day of observation, I saw students staring at Chromebooks and phones while the teacher was talking, but she saw them filling out a survey, checking whether extra-credit assignments had been tabulated, and taking notes on Google docs.
The pandemic normalized a terminology of school as either “remote” or “in-person,” dependent on the location of students’ physical bodies. If school is “hybrid,” this logic goes, some bodies are on-site while others are at home. But in education, another kind of “hybrid” has become the norm, with bodies in the classroom—legs twitching, heads nodding—while students and teachers simultaneously converse online. The classroom environment has changed more in the past few years than perhaps any window of time prior, and as a teacher, I often find myself nostalgic for a “simpler” past. But is there any going back? A full-out device ban suggests the cat can be put back in the bag, but to imagine a future of unmonitored adulthood for my high schoolers is to realize that I’d do them a bigger favor by teaching them ways to train the cat.
Teaching high schoolers to ignore the vortex of their phones is undoubtedly challenging, but so is the practical implementation of a ban that both parents and students will resist. As one grinning student told me in reference to her parents’ harsh tech guidelines: “Tell me I can’t do something and I’ll figure out a way to do it.” A ban might mean not allowing students to arrive with cell phones, collecting them at the beginning of the day and distributing them at the end, requiring them to stay in backpacks all day, or distributing locked pouches where students store their devices until a teacher “unlocks” them with a wireless signal.
But each method comes with its own drawbacks. A primary challenge in resource-strapped public schools across America is implementation and funding. The locking Yondr pouches cost $15 to $30 per student, an expense shouldered by already cash-strapped school districts, with students often responsible for replacement costs if bags break (a feat students have inevitably learned to do themselves). During New York City’s now-outlawed eight-year ban on devices, a cottage industry of local businesses offering to store devices made more than $4 million a year off students willing to pay for safekeeping themselves—all the same, this mass-storage eventually opened the door to mass theft. Though unilateral bans hypothetically affect all students, students are unlikely to be impacted equally. Research has shown that while the pandemic boosted screen time universally, adolescents facing systemic racism-driven financial and social inequalities have seen the greatest increase. When cell phone use becomes grounds for discipline, history suggests minority students suffer the most.
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Furthermore, under a policy of top-down prohibition, teachers are tasked as enforcers, rather than—as so many of us aspire to be in our classrooms—role models who treat students with trust and maturity, and receive this in return. According to a 2019 survey from Common Sense Media, a San Francisco-based nonprofit focused on children, media, and technology, only four out of 10 teachers said they had received useful professional development on digital citizenship policies, with high school teachers more likely to report that implementing cell phone policies was a challenge in the classroom. When schools do not create a shared vocabulary around tech addiction and educational norms to refer to, teachers carry the burden not only of inventing and enforcing tech standards in their class, but of trying to describe to students why they exist at all.
Because I know how it feels to stand before a room of students wondering how I can compete with their friends on Snapchat, I fantasize about a world where these addictive design elements—much like poisonous snakes and Covid-19— fall off the earth entirely. My longing extends outside the classroom: Nothing makes me more aware of my own proclivity toward distraction than watching my students try to write.
My past few years as an unsupervised freelancer have necessitated experiments with my own tech use, and it’s been buoying to see that the same ways I’ve trained myself to focus my attention have worked in the classroom. A projection of a seven-minute timer with instructions to “free-write until the alarm” becomes an anchor for my students’ minds. I tell them I do this on a larger scale throughout the day with a 25-minute “pomodoro” timer app. I quote from books like Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing, and share my own fumbling attempts at “digital fasts” and turning the colors on my screens to grayscale. I show them apps like Forest, which plants trees on my phone (and in real life) when I don’t touch it, and Freedom, which blocks certain websites across devices at programmed hours of the day. I reveal that sometimes I just hand my device to someone to babysit, or hide it in the basement and force myself to walk away.
These techniques and tools create, in effect, a self-enforced ban, but it’s exactly the sort of thing educators and parents should be teaching students to implement themselves, the way “meatless Monday” is a more palatable gateway than mandated veganism. Cundiff’s public school, for example, has a universal policy where teachers wield red, yellow, and green light cards to show whether phones should be put away, used academically, or with free rein. If phones are, as multiple educators told me, student safety blankets, then practicing withdrawal for, say, 20 minutes at a time is less anxiety-inducing than full confiscation for those students, who have spent the past few years tethered to their devices—and the perpetual access to loved ones that they offer.
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Students should enter the adult world understanding not only how their devices are addictive but their own addictive tendencies. Mary Beth Hertz, the author of Digital and Media Literacy in the Age of the Internet: Practical Classroom Applications, incorporated a screen time-tracking project into her freshman Intro to Technology class, building off of Manoush Zomorodi’s TED talk on the creative possibilities of boredom. It’s rare for schools to get a class like this, but if administrators provide professional support for digital literacy and training on pedagogical models of meta-mindfulness, these lessons and conversations might become more normalized throughout the curriculum.
During the start of lockdown, I spoke on the phone with another high school writing teacher about how the purpose of school had changed, seemingly overnight. The world was collapsing; our curriculum was too. What did we want to offer students as we faced the great unknown? Now, as the tide of pandemic policy recedes, education looks very different, and a new window of possibility for tech education has opened. “There is a strong sense that we have an opportunity here, and that it’s not clear whether we’re going to take advantage of it,” says Hertz.
When I think about answering that question now, I think of how I can show these wonderfully inquisitive, sensitive, digital-native teenagers the illusive beauty of creative “flow,” the sort accessible to a mind when the windows are closed to the world and attention doesn’t leak beyond the page. I want them to know this is attainable on a device, but also off of it, maybe when we go outside with pens and notebooks. At the same time, I do not want my students to feel shame, as I once did, when they struggle to reach that “flow.” It is not a sign they cannot write; they do not have bad brains. Instead, I want them to recognize the ways their attention has been hijacked. I want them to know how to turn off the internet, turn on the timer, and stand sentry for what comes next.