In 2005, when I began teaching high school, social media was just emerging. Only 34 million Americans owned a cell phone, compared to the 203 million who own them now, and those phones were considered high tech if they sent text messages. In that quaint world of yesteryear, kids didn’t text each other under their desks—they still passed paper notes.
They cheated on their chemistry midterms by writing formulas on the palms of their hands, not by taking pictures of the test during first period and forwarding to their friends in eighth period. They still wore watches, listened to the radio, watched television on an actual television, and took pictures with an actual camera. Almost none of them used Facebook. Instagram, Twitter, and Tumblr didn’t exist.
In less than a decade, the smartphone and its attendant social network have reached ubiquity in our culture, and high school handbooks have been scrambling to keep up. We’ve always had our hands full enforcing dress code rules that change with the times: just when we’ve finally gotten a handle on how to deal with pants-sagging in boys, there is an outbreak of yoga pants in girls. And what is to be done about facial piercings, tattoos, or the kid who wears a “Fuck the police” t-shirt that is clearly visible through his dress code-compliant white polo shirt? But in the last five years or so, the tidal wave of smartphone technology has made all those problems seem mild. Snapchats, furtive video recording, sexting, online bullying, and selfies by students and sometimes even teachers are giving school principals headaches their forebears could never have imagined.
When I first started teaching, cell phones were a non-issue in the classroom. Now, they require a whole separate section in our student handbook. At my school, phones must be left in lockers at all times, despite the fact that locker theft is a fairly common occurrence. If a student gets caught using his phone in class, the teacher is supposed to confiscate it and take it to the Dean’s office, where it cannot be returned until a parent or guardian comes to pick it up.
A couple years ago, when the cell-phone policy was enacted, I dutifully tried to enforce it, draining and futile as my efforts were. But then, in 2012, I got a summer job copyediting at a digital marketing agency. I’d been a teacher for my whole career, and I was amazed and intimidated by life in the contemporary corporate world: the young, hip staff who wore jeans five days a week and brought their dogs to work with them, the cigarette breaks, the state-of-the-art loft space that served as an office. I was given a brand new Mac on my first day on the job, people who sat ten feet from each other communicated all day via instant message, and in brainstorming meetings, everyone brought their cell phones, left them on the conference table, and checked them regularly.
Every company has its own unique culture, and I understand that what is acceptable at a marketing agency might not be appropriate at, say, a law firm or a bank. But this experience got me thinking about the increasing disconnect between the real world job market and the day-to-day reality of high school.
The Common Core State Standards and the increased emphasis on the STEM disciplines are meant to address this disconnect by emphasizing skills that will be most useful to twenty-first century workers. But even as we make attempts to align curriculum with the needs of our new economy, the daily routines of high school remain strangely inert, fossilized in amber to reflect a time long dead.
Kids still move through the hallways from bell to bell like factory workers in a country where most factory work has long since been outsourced to nightmarish sweatshops in Bangladesh and Malaysia. Teachers still demand that students look up unknown words in a dictionary or find a country on an outdated world map hanging on the wall, stubbornly ignoring the fact that in any other circumstance, we would all simply Google it. School districts conduct lockdown drills to prepare for the possibility of a school shooting, and these are the new duck and cover drills of the Cold War era; designed to give the illusion of safety, all they really do is give teenagers a moment, as they huddle in the corner of a classroom with the lights out, to contemplate just how wounded a society they are about to inherit.
I’m aware that there are certain affluent schools where every student has an iPad, where there are state-of-the-art science labs, green houses, dance studios, graphic design software, and, for all I know, laser tag obstacle courses, and in these places, technology is incorporated seamlessly into classroom life. But I teach in a large urban district in a state where two of our last three governors are in prison for corruption. My students are not especially poor, not especially rich, and not part of any “gifted” program, which means we are never earmarked for extra money. We have three small computer labs in a school of 3,200, and the computers in these labs are so old and overused that it takes a full five minutes to log onto the network—sort of like an AOL dial-up, but slower. And once they do log on, their web search experience is about as censored as that of your average citizen of North Korea. The other day, while giving my students some notes on a twenty-five-year-old overhead projector, a student asked me to “scroll back up to the top.” I obliged her by picking up the transparency sheet and moving it up.
In this climate, the presence of an iPhone would be bordering on anachronistic, and I wonder: is that what’s making schools act like cell phones aren’t a part of everyday life and should be squirreled away in lockers until the 3 o’clock bell—our own embarrassment at the inadequate resources we’ve provided our students? And what message does it send to our kids when the only school technology that is truly up-to-date is the metal detectors they have to walk through on their way into school?
There are plenty of compelling arguments against allowing kids to use their phones in class: that it will hurt concentration, exacerbate smartphone addiction, or cause kids to retreat further into the online world, thus compromising their social skills. But are these deleterious effects limited to teenagers? Plenty of adults have been distracted from a big work project by the chirp of a text message, or are unable to refrain from checking their phones while at the movie theater, or can curate a vibrant and dynamic Facebook page, only to go to a party and find themselves as shy and insecure as they’ve always been. Many of the students in our population already feel that high school is a waste of time, an outdated system whose diploma has become increasingly meaningless when it comes to finding a career. Barring them from using their cell phones in class only further alienates them from school and supports their belief that what the whole enterprise of high school is irrelevant.
I’m not saying there shouldn’t be times when phones need to be put away. During class discussions, student presentations, and exams, it makes sense to require that students devote their entire attention to the task at hand. But until we can provide our students the classroom technology that makes personal cell phone use unnecessary, why are we banning their use completely? Is it to improve our students’ educational experience? Or is it just a way to hide from ourselves the ways in which we’ve already failed them?
Jessie Foley recently won the Sheehan YA Book Prize and her novel, Carnival at Bray will be coming out at the end of 2014 from Elephant Rock Books. She is a teacher and writer whose fiction and essays have appeared in Salon, The Madison Review, McSweeney’s, The Chicago Reader, Writer’s Digest, Hypertext, Sixfold, and other magazines. She lives with her husband and baby-to-be in her native Chicago.