Elise Wilke-Grimm
News/Opinion Editor
Portable devices have become very common in everyday life and in education. This can be positive but also negative. Limiting use of cellphones in school, students’ minds can be focused on the task at hand.
Phone addiction is a common problem for today’s students, especially those who have been exposed to mainstream technology since they were very young.
Growing this dependency for screens takes away from the tasks that students can accomplish with their own minds. Though Google Translate is helpful for world language classes, it creates problems for the future. When an unlimited amount of information is at the tips of students fingers why would students bother with memorization.
In an environment that should be designated to learning, there are constant distractions that change the pace of the class for the teacher and the students. When students are distracted by their phones, it makes it easier for them to forget everything that the teacher was just lecturing about.
Jocelyn Reese is an art teacher and her opinions on phone use are that they shouldn’t have any place in school.
“There are so many people who have not developed a sense of self control, and I think it’s really detrimental and distracting because people will engage with their electronic device and whip their phone out and check social media and lose the sense of reality,” Reese said.
A USA Today article “Parental debate: Should your kid have a cellphone in school” said children don’t even play together during recess and break anymore because they’re all on their phones. Phones are distracting from the important things in school like building relationships and gaining knowledge.
There are good things about cell phones, too. Educational trivia sites, Dictionary.com and other websites make learning faster, more efficient and would be more time consuming without screens. Also, phones don’t cost the district any money because normally students already have devices capable of doing the things that teachers ask of the class.
Some teachers might love how cell phones are like a portable computer that they always have with them. Therefore if students ever have a question that they don’t know the answer to, they can just do their own independent research and figure it out. Electronics can come in handy, but if they’re out all the time, more negative effects will be exhibited in the future than positive.
Rules definitely need to change. The world is growing and expanding and so is technology. It is prominent basically everywhere. Though there are lots of pros and cons, the system of completely banning smartphones in school won’t satisfy everyone, and the system of using technology and smartphones for everything will also not satisfy everyone.
“I get easily distracted when I am on my phone, it doesn’t help me at all when I am in school and I notice it taking a negative effect on my grades,” Ava Sauer, sophomore, said.
There needs to be a middle point that everyone is happy and comfortable with. A developing future cannot continue to thrive unless we learn to adjust and ensure that we are correctly following it up. Enforcing new rules around the classroom like phones only allowed for educational purposes/not allowed at all is a good place to start.
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