Next year, she hopes to be at university and is looking forward to freedom.
Transcription:
Steve Inskeep, host:
More states prohibit students from using their phone during class hours. Some individual schools too. One of my children should zip the phone in a small bag during school hours. Sequoia Carrillo de NPR has history.
Sequoia Carrillo, Byline: This school year is the first where each student of public schools and in Charter du Texas will be without his phone during the school day. But Brigette Whaley, associate teacher of education at the West Texas A & M University, has an intuition of the way things will happen.
Brigette Whaley: a fair environment, a more engaging class for students.
Carrillo: She spent last year studying the deployment of a mobile phone ban in a public high school in western Texas, focusing on what teachers thought of the program. They saw an improved commitment and more conversations between students.
Whaley: They were really happy to see that the students were more willing to work with each other.
Carrillo: Student anxiety has also dropped, according to his research. The main reason? Students were not afraid to be filmed at any time and bother.
Whaley: They could relax in class and participate and not be so worried about what the other students did.
Carrillo: The results of western Texas correspond to the results of many states and districts that return to school without phones. Students learn better in an environment without a phone. It was a rare problem with bipartite support, allowing rapid adoption of policies in many states. This rapid rhythm, says Whaley, can sometimes be a danger for the impact of politics. While most teachers of the school, she studied, supported the ban …
Whaley: There was a teacher who did not well applied politics, and who seemed to cause other teachers difficulties.
Alex Stegner: Each teacher had a slightly different policy on this subject.
Carrillo: It was Alex Stegner, professor of social studies and geography in Portland, Oregon, who talks about the ban on his district. He says that the different types of application were normal in his school. Last year, each teacher from Lincoln High School obtained a lock to collect phones at the start of the course.
Steger: Some teachers did not locked the boxes. Some teachers left the doors wide open. And some teachers, like me, locked them. I was just determined to go with it, and I liked it.
Carrillo: He said that last year was the first year in a decade, he did not spend time hunting mobile phones in the room. Now, while Lincoln is entering his second year with a kind of ban, things change a little. This year, students’ phones will be locked up for the whole day, not just classes time. Steger thinks it will be a learning curve, but not only for teachers and students.
Steger: I think some parents will have trouble. But I think there seems to be this kind of collective understanding that we were able to do something different.
Carrillo: Like many schools, Lincoln High School will distribute individual locked bags, known as Yondr pockets, to students this year – the same as those used in the Whaley district studied in Texas and for around 2 million students.
Steger: I heard stories last year on the bags of Yondr, you know, open, destroyed. And there is an entire logistical thing, as who comes with students these covers and tell them, as, OK, now it’s your responsibility.
Carrillo: Teachers therefore seem to like mobile phone prohibitions. But as for children …
Rosalie Morales: You will see a different response from students.
Carrillo: Rosalie Morales is in her second year to supervise the DELAware pilot program for a mobile phone ban on the state scale. She questioned teachers and students at the end of the first year to wonder if the ban should continue. Eighty-three percent of teachers said yes, while only 11% of students agreed.
Zoe George: It’s boring.
Carrillo: Zoe George, student at the Bard High School Early College in Manhattan, says that no one asked her before the prohibited mobile phones of New York.
George: I want them to hear us more.
Carrillo: She is concerned about the implications for duties and school work during free periods. She says that her school does not have enough computers for each student, so often students used their phones. But also, it’s just a nuisance.
George: It’s not the worst because it’s my last year. But at the same time, this is my last year.
Carrillo: Next year, she hopes to be at university and she is looking forward to freedom.
Sequoia Carrillo, NPR News.
(Soundbit of Song, “Phone Down”)
Erykah Badu: (song) I can do you, I can make you, I can have you put your phone.
Inskeep: Are there a history of human beings surviving without mobile phones? Yes. Yes, there are.
