Last week I had a conversation with one of my homeroom students that took me by surprise. She asked me a question about an email she had sent me, and I took my phone out of my pocket to bring up the email. When I unlocked my phone, and she saw my home screen, she became confused:
“Wait, what? I thought you had an iPhone,” she said.
“I do,” I answered. “This is an iPhone.”
“Why does it look like that?”
“I’ve made it this way to make it look boring.”
“Boring? Are you trying to reduce your screen time?”
“Yes, exactly!”
“But why?”
“What do you mean, ‘why?’”
“Like, you’re a grown-up.”
“So?”
“What does screen time matter to you? You can do what you want.”
“Do you think screen time doesn’t matter to me because I’m a grown-up?”
“I mean, like, you’re not a student. You don’t have to worry about focusing on studying or whatever like we do.”
“But I’ve got my job to do, in the same way that studying is like your job.”
“That’s not the same, though. You’re an adult!”
“I don’t understand why you think that’s different.”
We never managed to get to the bottom of why she thinks that way. I suspect that due to her reality being shaped by her experience, having grown up in an age when parents and teachers are constantly telling her that she needs to get off her phone and study, she just unconsciously assumed that this is a particularly adolescent problem. But I’m less interested in the actual answer to that question than I am with going through the process of finding the answer together with her—putting myself in my students’ shoes and trying to look at the world the way they do by asking them questions about what they think is one of the most interesting and enjoyable parts of my job. After conversations like that, I always end up then reflecting on myself and my own way of looking at the world, and so this week I was left thinking about how I got to this point.
My homeroom this year is in the 3rd grade of high school (equivalent to Grade 12 in the U.S.) and they all studied abroad for 7 or 10 months during their previous year, either in Canada or in England. They have generally been happy and relieved to be back in Japan and reunited with their families and friends. Universally, the thing they missed the most, they all say, was Japanese food.
I have also, however, watched them struggle in many ways to re-conform to school life in Japan. Being responsible for keeping our classroom clean, and not being allowed to eat or drink during classes are things that teachers are constantly having to remind them of. And many of the girls especially aren’t pleased about returning to the strict rules banning jewelry, piercings, and makeup.
The biggest school policy that they clash with, though, is the cell phone collection. Schools in Canada and England evidently allow students to carry their cell phones at all times, and they have told me that in the more unruly classrooms students pay far more attention to their phones than to the teacher. But at our school, students have to hand in their phones to the homeroom teacher in the morning, where they are all kept sealed inside a blue box in the teacher’s office for the entire day. The phones are returned to the students when we have shurei, which is our homeroom meeting we have after the last class of the day before students are dismissed to go home or to their clubs or whatever. (The word shurei is made of the kanji characters for ‘ending’ and ‘bow,’ and the dismissal always concludes with all students standing up, bowing to the teacher, and saying in chorus: “arigatou gozaimashita!”)
I know I’m not saying anything new (all parents and teachers have been aware of this for some time), but it is remarkable how important a phone is to a teenager. It cannot be understated. They moan and whine every single morning when it is time to collect phones, as though they were being asked to give up a limb. They make the walk to the front of the room where the blue box is waiting with their phone in hands as slowly and glumly as a death row inmate making their final walk. They stop at their friends’ desks along the way to take a quick selfie, send a quick snap on Snapchat, make a quick story on Instagram—whatever they can do in these last desperate moments before being separated from their precious phone for the next 6 hours. When they finally get it back, they run to collect it as though they’re being reunited with a long-lost child. “MY PHONE! MY PHONE! I MISSED YOU!” they shout in ecstatic exaltation.
“Why do we have to give up our phones?” “Why can’t we hang onto them?” “As long as we don’t use them during class, isn’t it fine?” These questions never stop being asked. My typical response is to dismiss it by saying, “I don’t make the rules; you can take it up with the administration,” because most of the time I need to get on with my day and can’t make the time to have a full conversation about it. The truth is, though, that for a while, I actually agreed with the students.
This ‘blue box’ policy was only put in place about 6 years ago. Up until then, students were, in fact, allowed to keep their phones with them all day. There were strict rules about not using them during classes, of course (and I had to confiscate phones fairly regularly from students who couldn’t control themselves), and even during break times students were encouraged to keep their screen time to a minimum in favor of face to face interactions instead. The only times we used the blue boxes for collecting phones were on exam days, so we could be absolutely sure that no one even had the temptation to use their phone to cheat.
When the policy changed to using the blue boxes every day—exams or not—the impression I received was that teachers were just generally tired of having to confiscate phones all the time. “Too many students can’t control themselves.” “It’s too much of a distraction, and they need to be able to put their full focus into studying.” I understood the logic there, but to me it felt like a cop-out of a policy. These students are going to go out, live, and work in a society in which cell phones are a ubiquitous part of life. If our job as educators is to help students to become valuable members of society, doesn’t it make more sense that we teach them to live with their phones? Removing them from the equation entirely is just a cowardly way of running away from the problem, forcing the students to deal with it on their own after they graduate, rather than helping them to live in a more harmonious balance with their devices by actually educating them.
I know from my own life experience that just removing a problem is not always the best solution when the problem is sure to come back later in life. I don’t remember at what age exactly because I was quite small, but at some point in my early childhood my parents faced a similar dilemma in regard to my siblings and my screentime with the television. We were simply watching too much (from their view), and not respecting the rules of limits they wanted to impose upon us, so they decided to remove the source of the problem entirely and threw out our TVs.
From elementary school all the way until I graduated high school, we lived without TVs in our home, and while it certainly did remove the distraction physically, it only made my obsession with TV more intense in my mind. I spent so much time calculating ways that I could sneak some TV time into my life. I went to friends’ homes so I could watch TV; there were several sleepovers when I stayed up the entire night watching TV, long after my friends had gone to bed. I somehow got a hold of a small handheld TV that I kept hidden and would sneak viewing sessions when I thought I could get away with it. For a while we had a van that had a TV in it, and I would plan strategic moments—when I had performed well in school, or when they were too tired to bother—to ask my parents if I could go and watch something in the van.
When I went to college and was living away from home, I finally got a TV and—having free unrestricted access to TV for the first time in over a decade—my fun little obsession fully bloomed into something very unhealthy. I couldn’t get enough of TV. Sitcoms, game shows, dramas, anything at all. And not only that, but the other joys that went along with having a TV: video games and DVDs. I got a job at Blockbuster Video because I was renting or buying DVDs and video games at an insane pace, and I needed to do something to sustain it. As an employee, I was allowed 5 free rentals every week, and even still I often went over that amount. Whatever I could get my hands on, I consumed with an undiminishing hunger. At my absolute lowest, I was put on academic probation in college because I was doing the bare minimum of what I needed to scrape by, but I had even started to fail at that.
I’m not saying I blame my parents for all those problems. How could they possibly have predicted such a ripple of effects? And in the end, I turned out all right, I guess (didn’t I?). But it’s an issue that continues to be a struggle for me well into adulthood; in some ways, with current technology it’s now a harder struggle for me than it’s ever been. So I can’t help but wonder if, by taking cell phones away from students—by removing the devices entirely, rather than trying to teach students to cope with them—we aren’t doing more long-term harm than good?
My views on that, however, changed pretty dramatically last year, after reading Nicholas Carr’s book, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains. That book, in fact, changed a lot of things for me. I credit it as the trigger that set me down my current path of reading and writing on a daily basis. My friend recommended it to me when I remarked to him about my struggle with addiction to TV and entertainment—that I was spending nearly every waking moment either watching something or listening to a podcast (when I wasn’t working)—and that I had read only a small handful of books in the more than a decade since graduating from college.
The Shallows looks at the history of technological developments—particularly with respect to media—and how each big shift in technology has gone hand in hand with psychological and intellectual changes. With the Internet, he argues, the incredible volume of information that we are near-constantly bombarded with, in ways that are specifically designed to pull at our attention and hold it for as long as possible, is having a profound effect on our cognitive abilities: some good—he is willing to admit—but mostly bad.
Using the Net may… exercise the brain the way solving crossword puzzles does. But such intensive exercise, when it becomes our primary mode of thought, can impede deep learning and thinking. Try reading a book while doing a crossword puzzle; that’s the intellectual environment of the Internet.
…
The influx of competing messages that we receive whenever we go online not only overloads our working memory; it makes it much harder for our frontal lobes to concentrate our attention on any one thing. The process of memory consolidation can’t even get started… [T]he more we use the Web, the more we train our brain to be distracted—to process information very quickly and very efficiently but without sustained attention. That helps explain why many of us find it hard to concentrate even when we’re away from our computers. Our brains become adept at forgetting, inept at remembering. (p. 125, 194)
The Shallows was originally published in 2010, however—less than 3 years after the debut of the very first iPhone. Carr’s arguments were written well before smartphones became such a ubiquitous part of life for working adults, let alone teenagers. So he revisited the book much later, and in 2020 the 10th Anniversary Edition of The Shallows was released, updated with an all-new chapter that tackles the rise of smartphones. That is the version that I read, and that is what changed my mind about banning phones in school.
In the updated chapter, Carr examines how attached people have become to their phones (mentally, emotionally, and physiologically), and looks at some studies and surveys that have explored the effects of that attachment. There’s the, “2015 study, published in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, [that] showed that when people hear their phone ring but are unable to answer it, their blood pressure spikes, their pulse quickens, and their problem-solving skills weaken.” (p. 229) And that’s the just beginning. “A 2016 experiment by a University of Virginia psychologist and two colleagues revealed that phone notifications produce symptoms of hyperactivity and absentmindedness similar to those that afflict people with attention deficit disorders.” (p. 229) “Psychologists at the University of Southern Maine found that people who had their phones in view, albeit turned off, during two demanding tests of attention and cognition made significantly more errors than did a control group whose phones remained out of sight.” (p. 230) In another experiment, “researchers found that students who didn’t bring their phones to the classroom scored a full letter grade higher on a test of the material presented than those who had their phones with them. It didn’t matter whether the students who had their phones used them or not: All of them scored equally poorly.” (p. 231)
Researchers seem to have found again and again that, “as the phone’s proximity increased, brainpower decreased. It was as if the smartphones had force fields that sapped their owners’ intelligence… The more heavily the students relied on their phones in their everyday lives, the greater the cognitive penalty they suffered when their phones were nearby.” (p. 230) Indeed, when correlating student performance on standardized tests across schools that ban phones and those that do not, we can see that, “when schools ban smartphones, students’ examination scores go up substantially, with the weakest students benefitting the most.” (p. 231)
The reasons for all those correlations have not yet been clearly defined, but Carr theorizes that it all comes down to distraction. The power of the physiological reactions we feel when receiving a notification on our phones is so strong that even when our phones are not in our hands—if they’re in our pockets or lying on a table within eyesight—the anticipation of receiving a notification at any random moment is enough to give us nearly the same physiological response, and keep us from being able to concentrate on anything else. “With the smartphone,” he says, “the human race has succeeded in creating the most interesting thing in the world. No wonder we can’t take our minds off it.” (p. 233)
Reading The Shallows was enough to make me want to throw my phone out the window and never look back, but alas, I too am susceptible to the same addictions as my students. I love to scroll through Instagram and like my friends’ photos. I love going on YouTube and getting lost in an endless rabbit hole of infotainment. But I did manage to force myself to step back and make some significant changes to my lifestyle with regard to how I use my phone. I thought about what I want my relationship to my phone to look like, and how I can take some concrete steps in arranging my user interface on my phone to facilitate that.
For one, I have completely turned off all notifications. Texts, emails, whatever. It’s all off. I’m addicted enough to my phone that I will end up opening the apps and seeing the messages sooner or later, anyways, so there’s no need for me to be immediately alerted to any incoming messages. This change has gone such a long way to allowing me to focus on tasks without distraction, whether it’s for work or for pleasure. I couldn’t possibly be reading and writing as much as I am now had I not made that change. I worried at first whether it would negatively impact my work life or personal life if I didn’t receive and respond to people’s messages in a timely fashion, but it’s been a year now, and everything seems to be fine. Besides, if people really need to get my attention urgently, they can still call me.
The other changes I made were all about my phone’s home screen. I wanted to remove any unnecessary distractions from it and get right down to the core of what I need, so I changed the phone’s screen settings to monochrome, got rid of the usual app grid, and instead replaced it with a widget that lists and links to my most essential apps that I use (and want to continue using) on a daily basis. You saw the result of that rearrangement at the beginning of this newsletter.
Of course, I’m no digital saint. I still have all those other (more distracting) apps like Instagram and YouTube and even some games, but they’re off the main screen and I have to do just a little bit of extra work to hit that ‘search’ button and type their name in order to launch them. I’ve found that just that little bit of extra work has been enough to reduce the number of times I’ll visit it on any given day, and I feel like any reduction, even a small one, is worth pursuing.