Trending
Long before cell phones invaded every school in the state driving down student attention spans to lower than the balance in your checkboo, about the only way students back in the day could ignore the teacher was to hide a dirty book inside the pages of a text book and then hope teach would not wander by to see it.
We’ve come a long way baby since then.
So here we are as schools begin with a brand new state law aimed at shifting students from screens to the good old black board. The question is will it work given the level of addiction a whole host of students have if the research is correct? Maybe you know from personal experience?
GOP Rep. Mark Tisdel from Oakland County has labored four years on this issue along with a handful of dedicated colleagues to hammer out a way to modify this academically driven challenge.
The good news is while he and others tried to convince colleagues to do something, a whole bunch of schools were doing it on their own. Some banned the devices others took steps to reduce usage and teachers were quick to report there was noise in the hallways between classes like it use to be pre-cells. “Kids were actually talking to one another…IN PERSON.” Egads.
One commentator often told audiences, this younger generation will never fall in love because you have to look that certain someone directly in the eyes to show your love and doing it remote won’t get it done. A little off the wall? Of course, but the message has some validity to it. Agree?
Meanwhile back at the ranch at the capitol.
The”Gold Standard” of cell phone control is forcing the student to leave their cells behind before they enter the school and keep it that way until they get out of school. Mr. Tisdel thinks in the long term, every school will get there but for this moment, he is settling for half a loaf instead.
He got “a uniform requirement in K-12 grades of a prohibition during instruction time,” which means in-between classes and lunch time, students can relieve their anxiety over not knowing who is saying what to somebody else.
The most foolproof method to implement this is to have the youngsters place these pesky allures in some sort of depository in the classroom. Allowing the kids to just stuff them in their backpacks are probably a bad idea as they will find a way to respond to pings right in the middle of learning about the
The good thing about this is that it takes the teachers, administrators and other advocates off the hook with the kids and in many cases their parents.
As he explains, under the old system it was often left up to the instructor to decide what the policy was and if it was to ban them in the classroom, kids would come home, complain to their parents, and before too long, mom and or dad would confront the teacher who may or may not have had the principal or superintendent there to back the teacher up.
“Make me the bad buy,” the affable Mr. Tisdel suggests. He would gladly take that heat if it helps to raise test scores and at least momentarily give the students a mental break from the pressure of needing to be on line.
The good news is, according to research out of the U of M, that 95% of the schools have a policy of either the bell to bell ban or the grab-them-at-the-door strategy.
Part of the reason this took four years of legislative delay was driven in part by other stuff that was happening in our schools.
The entire state stood still when the news flash came out of Mr. Tisdel’s own county that three students were killed at the Oxford high school. It’s somewhat amazing that the state was among the last to experience such trauma. On that horrific day parents scrambled to use their cells to connect with their student cells and in the wake of this tragedy, any mention of banning cells in schools seemed so far fetched that the votes in Lansing would never materialize to address the issue. Lawmakers knew that parents vote and a yes vote on a ban was a sure fire way to the unemployment line for legislators.
Rep. Tisdel pointed out that if students were talking to parents when someone at the front of the room was trying to usher them to safety, there could be even more injuries.
Hence in the spirit of compromise, a provision was added to the new law addressing these deeply held concerns.
You may recall when you were in school, when parents needed to get in touch with their children, the only option was to call the school and have the message sent to the classroom.That worked because never was there a time when every parent was flooding the switchboard at the same time.
Unfortunately we’ve also come a long way baby from those pre-mass shooting days.
There is one mitigating variable in all this. Like it or not devices are not just. distractions, they are actually being used to educate as there is a wealth of valuable information on line that teachers can use to pour more knowledge into the curriculum.
So for the moment, Mr. Tisdel will take what he can get and wait for his total daily ban sometime down the road.
“People are going to try to cheat,” he concedes.” But if we get 80% compliance, that’s huge progress.”
Better late than never hey?