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| Example of phone being used during school. Not a selife but still a Kodak moment. |
This past year, a discussion about drafting new cell phone policy rules started throughout my school. The current cell phone policy allows no cell phones in class; all cell phones must be turned off and in a locker. But many students argue the benefits of using a cell phone during class such as to take videos or pictures of labs, to check Veracross, or to call/text parents during school. I myself have used my phone to take pictures of a chemistry lab set up. But do the benefits of a cell phone in class outweigh the harms? It seems most of the time students use their phones to snapchat or to procrastinate, not to take pictures or videos for a class. Not only that, but besides taking a picture or calling a parent, a laptop can suffice for any “looking up” students need to do in class.
The
discussion about a new cell phone policy reflects a greater question of how
technology influences students and how education needs to react to that
influence. Students face enough distractions in class from doodling to zoning
out to talking to classmates. With each student bringing their own laptop to
class, students find it hard enough to not surf the web or go on facebook. Cell
phones can add a whole another element of distractions to students. Recently,
researchers have begun examining the effect of technology on students. Matt
Richtel summarizes two studies in the New York Times, the Pew Research
Center and the Common Sense Media which both conducted surveys for teachers.
The research explored how students have been behaving and doing
in classroom while growing up in this high tech world and who better to ask
than teachers. Though because the data came from surveys which creates room for
bias, generally, most teachers said that students seemed to have shorter
attention spans and were less perverse when faced with a difficult problem or
challenge. Several teachers mentioned needing to dance around to capture
students' attention. The shorter attention span seems expected, with the rise
of technology children are a finger tip away from any sort of entertainment.
Forget about sitting quietly for long periods of time when we have candy crush to play, notifications to check, and music to jam to. And we can do those all at
once. Technology allows us to multitask all the time. Not only does this affect our attention spans, but also our ability to
stick to a question. As Richtel explains "teachers described what
might be called a 'Wikipedia problem,' in which students have grown so
accustomed to getting quick answers with a few keystrokes that they are more
likely to give up when an easy answer eludes them." I see this all the
time and even succumb to it, when a difficult math or physic problem comes up
students often just skip it or look up the answer online after spending a mere
5minutes working on the problem. Not to mention, no one actually reads the
reading assignments anymore. I think students have always been distracted in
class but the problem affects more and more students and makes it more and more
difficult for students to learn. So clearly, there is a problem, or at least a
change in the way students learn in class.
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| Picture
seen on facebook at Wellesley, not SPA but you get the point: mass multitasking |
There seem to be two ways to respond to this
change: either resist it or find a new way to somehow teach students. But these
two come from different assumptions, one assumes that for students to learn they
must know how to focus and listen to the teacher while the other assumes that
this new technological behavior should be nurtured and cultivated. The question comes down
to, what skills students need in order to succeed. Do we need to know how to focus and overcome difficult questions
or do we need to know how to find information fast? But the two responses also
reflect another problem with this change, whose responsibility is it to learn?
In the first response, it is more the students’ responsibility to learn by not being so dependent on technology and instead, learn how to focus and persevere while the second response pushes the responsibility to teachers and parents to find ways
to continuously entertain students in order to educate them. In some ways, just
changing the cell phone policy rules makes it seem students are not responsible for controlling their technology urges but rather, the rules should just change to accommodate
those urges.
For SPA, the new cell phone policy rules must
reflect the skills the school is trying to teach students. If teachers are
trying to teach students the power to persevere or to learn how to focus the
mind, then cell phones may prove just another obstacle students must overcome.
Or perhaps the school wants to teach students how to focus in an over
stimulating environment. But without clear punishment, it is easy for students
to fall victim to the lure of stimulation and go on facebook during class
instead of paying attention to the lecture. With technology already shortening our
attention spans and ability to persevere, maybe students should consider using less technology and stop snapchatting, candy crushing, or tweeting during class. Not only
that, but another part of education is learning to be healthy and in touch with
oneself. Technology allows us to enter a sort of daze where we are constantly
entertained and stimulated, we lose the ability to stop and reflect quietly on our
self, our community, and our world. There is something beautiful and powerful
in sitting quietly, it is in those quiet moments when we can become most
thoughtful. The great mathematicians, scientists, and philosophers of history did not become
great because they were constantly distracted by notifications or stalking
photos of their friends but because they knew how to sit quietly and focus on
something for hours, days, even years. Technology is not all bad in education
but it does take away our ability to just sit and work. (Yes, we can sit and work on a computer screen for hours, but that gets into a whole other discussions around socializing and we already have laptop screens to stare at.) Perhaps SPA does
not think this skill will be needed for students to succeed, but I’m not sure
how anything great was ever done without involving lots of long, quiet moments
of just sitting and focusing.
New York Times article on technology and education:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/01/education/technology-is-changing-how-students-learn-teachers-say.html?pagewanted=all
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