Looking back, I was surprised by the (unflattering, in my opinion) degree to which LWers saw this data as strong confirmation of their hypotheses about phones being the source of the ills they see in our schools and our young.
I thought it was much more of a mixed picture despite—or perhaps because—the numbers were significantly higher than I, a veteran teacher, had expected: If I had been told the previous summer that “next year, we’re giving you a cohort of students with this phone usage profile”, I might have braced for a crop of students that came off as especially scatterbrained. But overall, these students—even most of the high-receivers on the left of the chart—seemed to me about as well adjusted as teenagers of yesteryear and, I would say, better adjusted than the students I remember from the early days of pre-smartphone texting going mainstream. (There’s probably a thread to pick there about messages being more alive among teens with vibrant in-person social lives.)
The update for me from this experient was more like, “Huh, I guess notifications are just sort of a background hum of modern existence now. If adults can largely manage to be productive in this environment, maybe I shouldn’t be so surprised that young people who grew up in it can, too.” This it’s-just-a-different-world-now feeling was accentuated by the fact that the school itself was now behind a high fraction of notifications for the median student.
I’m wary of anecdotal clickbait-ish tales of “This school locked away phones, and something miraculous happened” because I would expect a honeymoon phase where an engaging teacher can step in and fill any real attention void before the more traditonal expressions of mental exhaustion and apathy can assert themselves.
To change my mind about this, I would need to linger in the counterfactual world where the students I had known from the start to be actually, problematically distracted by their devices were permanently deprived of them. My mental simulation of that world sees about half of these students gradually becoming traditional excessively-chatty-in-class types, and most of the rest daydreaming, sleeping, or checking out in some other way. To the extent that a busy life on a phone keeps a teen’s mind active, it might actually be an improvement?
Looking back, I was surprised by the (unflattering, in my opinion) degree to which LWers saw this data as strong confirmation of their hypotheses about phones being the source of the ills they see in our schools and our young.
I thought it was much more of a mixed picture despite—or perhaps because—the numbers were significantly higher than I, a veteran teacher, had expected: If I had been told the previous summer that “next year, we’re giving you a cohort of students with this phone usage profile”, I might have braced for a crop of students that came off as especially scatterbrained. But overall, these students—even most of the high-receivers on the left of the chart—seemed to me about as well adjusted as teenagers of yesteryear and, I would say, better adjusted than the students I remember from the early days of pre-smartphone texting going mainstream. (There’s probably a thread to pick there about messages being more alive among teens with vibrant in-person social lives.)
The update for me from this experient was more like, “Huh, I guess notifications are just sort of a background hum of modern existence now. If adults can largely manage to be productive in this environment, maybe I shouldn’t be so surprised that young people who grew up in it can, too.” This it’s-just-a-different-world-now feeling was accentuated by the fact that the school itself was now behind a high fraction of notifications for the median student.
I’m wary of anecdotal clickbait-ish tales of “This school locked away phones, and something miraculous happened” because I would expect a honeymoon phase where an engaging teacher can step in and fill any real attention void before the more traditonal expressions of mental exhaustion and apathy can assert themselves.
To change my mind about this, I would need to linger in the counterfactual world where the students I had known from the start to be actually, problematically distracted by their devices were permanently deprived of them. My mental simulation of that world sees about half of these students gradually becoming traditional excessively-chatty-in-class types, and most of the rest daydreaming, sleeping, or checking out in some other way. To the extent that a busy life on a phone keeps a teen’s mind active, it might actually be an improvement?