I welcome you to my blog. Our world has really evolved to the point where phones being allowed in school is now being considered; there were days when it was non-negotiable, and if you made the mistake of bringing your phone to school, then be sure you were never going to see that phone again. The first phone I ever used was seized in school, and trust me, to this date, I have never gotten to see my phone again, and neither I nor my parents could retrieve it despite pleading with the principal; all our pleas fell on a deaf ear, and I had to give up on getting the phone back.
Today I see students take phones to school, and the teachers take it lightly with them. When I was in school, you just had to know deep within you that you might lose your phone for good if you took the risk of bringing your phone to school. Back then our classmates only knew we had a phone when we told them about it, but they never got to see it because we hardly saw each other after school and mostly met in school, which is a no-phone zone for students. I feel teachers from back then knew better how much of a distraction phones would be if allowed in school or in class.
Trust me, we can claim that the students will use their phones to learn and carry out research, and it will make learning a lot easier for them, but the truth is that they will be more distracted by it than actually learning with it. Even as college students, when we were allowed to use phones to access PDF and Microsoft Word documents in class, the truth is that many of us back then were only receiving the lecturer; we had neither a PDF nor any word document open; rather, we would go about doing different things, and whenever the lecturer approached, we would immediately switch to what he or she would like to see.
Following up in such a class was quite difficult because our attention was completely divided between following what the lecturer was saying and doing our business, but since we claimed to be using a soft copy of the material, the lecturer could not tell us to put our phones away. Even many students complain about how they are easily distracted when reading with their phones or laptops; every sound or chime of a notification leaves one with that urge to want to check what the notification was about and drift into another world from there. So phones in school are a distraction; we cannot set that aside. Even if it will make learning easy, it will come with a disadvantage and probably one that outweighs the advantage.
Images were generated using chatgpt.
