An eighth-grade history teacher Kathy West made a tally chart on the classroom’s whiteboard, summing up the number of alerts students got from text messages, Snapchat, Instagram, YouTube, Games, Facebook, Twitter and News.
She took to social media to talk about the issue and wrote: “Every class period today (6 periods) I made my students put their phones on my table (some left phones in their lockers).
“At the end of class, we looked at their notifications. I didn’t read them, I just counted them. These are the notifications that my students got today in my class. Just my class.
“Not their other classes. Not lunch. Not any other time. Just my class. Think about it. How much of a distraction are these notifications to the students?
“Just think about it. If this is just my class…. what would it look like if all the classes were combined.”
Kathy told LADbible that she had around 80 phones on her desk throughout the day and some students chose to leave theirs in their locker.
She explained: “I had each phone for 45 minutes. Some [pupils] were shocked about the results. Some were not. Some felt that Snapchat would have been more.”
Her social media post received thousands of comments and shares. One person wrote: “What can they possibly be learning with all those distractions?”
Another added: “School is for educating, not for the distraction of cell phone usage. I would much rather have my child be able to focus on learning than texting.
Cell phones should be required to be taken away during a class period and then returned to the student just prior to the end of class. Cell phones are the new addiction of our youth!! Isn’t school supposed to be for learning……?”
A third commented: “Phones are the devil. They are robbing students of a quality education. I always had them to turn them in at the beginning of the period. It did not help much because some of them has two or three phones. If I found the others I always made sure to take them up and turn them into the Principal. They had to pay $15.00 to get them back.”
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