I’ve been thinking about addiction lately, and cannot help seeing my students constantly gazing into their palms as anything but problematic. As I’ve been musing about technology in the classroom this year, basic concerns about screen-time, as well as ideas about maximizing the technology as a benefit for education have come up, but in March (the longest and toughest month for everyone involved in education) concerning addictive behavior is at the forefront.

Students cannot seem to stop looking at their phone. I get the impulse, and spend a great deal of time on computers as well, less on the phone because of personal dislike of the medium. Sven Birkerts and Nicholas Carr worried about this years ago, and the research started in the recent past is playing out their fears—as evidenced in this study by Lin and Zhou: “Taken together, [studies show] internet addiction is associated with structural and functional changes in brain regions involving emotional processing, executive attention, decision making, and cognitive control.” Another study recently brought to my attention by a child occupational therapist, shows us that screens light up the same regions of the brain that cocaine sets afire. And science shows us addictive video games may change children’s brains in the same way as drugs and alcohol.

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My school has the policy that cell phone usage is up to each classroom teacher. I promptly outlawed them, and my ability-desire-energy around policing cell phone use in class has begun to atrophy. Most days I offer a reminder, and then I leave it to students. I comfort myself a bit with phrases from my college of education professors from fifteen years ago. If you hook thirty percent of the room, they will each bring someone along and then you have around sixty percent of the room. That’s pretty good in middle school and high school. Or the conclusion we came to after an hour plus long Socratic seminar on learning and internal motivation: no one can learn with a gun put to their head.

These ideas have shaped the way I teach. I don’t like to police, to enforce, to cajole. It is the main reason I only taught middle school for a few years. I just could not spend so much energy on classroom management. I prefer to focus on content and on the learning of the people before me. Incredibly hard for me to cultivate the necessary relationships (I get immeasurably grumpy) when constantly managing basic behaviors. Plus, I’m convinced nagging is good for no one.  Luckily, I teach in a school with a kind and compliant population, for the most part, and I mostly teach juniors and seniors. Enthusiasm, meaningful work, being authentically present, and gentle reminders are my preferred management tools.

It mostly works. Though just yesterday, in my AP Language class (in all seriousness one of the most academically advanced, kindest, and inquisitive groups I’ve ever worked with), we were discussing strategies for answering free-response question number two on the exam, and connecting it with David Foster Wallace’s How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart, and I had the room. They were focused on the text, on each other, on my questions, and, best of all, asking each other follow-up questions leaving me out of it. The whole twenty-eight focused on the task at hand. Except for one student gazing into her palm in the back of the class, oblivious to anything being said, to my hard stare (something most students feel, especially when the rest of the room is so focused) and I consciously decided to let it go.

I don’t take moments like that personally. Actually, I’m pretty convinced this student would rather not be on her phone. She doesn’t know it, but I think she is using the phone against her own personal will, and just does not have the efficacy to put it down. Or is in the camp of teenagers that when asked to put her phone away, places it on the table in front of her. She has trained herself, and society has encouraged it, that the phone is an extension of her day, and extension of her thinking, of her relationships, of her comforts, of her mind. How does a teacher push back against that?

This is also the end of the quarter at the community colleges I teach for online. In one literature class I discovered something rampant that used to be rare. I have a final exam which asks students to look through the poems, stories, and the pay we read in the last five weeks and to find examples of literary devices. They have to define the term, find a good example, and explain how it works in the text. It is one type of assessment among several from the term, and it is designed for them to use the texts and demonstrate understanding of terms used all term. One of the outcomes of the class is the ability to use the vocabulary of literature. Out of thirty students, I had eleven use Romeo and Juliet quotations as an example for the term subplot. It is an American literature course.

I searched for “subplot” and “definition” and found this site. A useful site providing definitions and examples of literary devices, where the first example is Romeo and Juliet. I found myself disappointed, and concerned both about these students’ scores, and (perhaps more deeply) about their habits of mind. They are of a generation, submerged in a culture that believes it can access all knowledge at any given moment, that the answers to anything are just out there in the cloud, and they’ve begun to offload critical thought. This will have larger reverberations than failing an open book literature exam.

It is not their fault. Not completely. I’m convinced what I see daily is addictive behavior. Anecdotally, a colleague and I have been asking students what their average screen time their phone reports has been:

5 hours

6 hours

13 hours (weekend)

6.5 hours

3 hours

5 hours

6 hours

7 hours

And this is just the screen time students spent on their phone during the school day. Additionally, the school requires work to be done on screens. I’ve mentioned before the argument that there is a difference between educational screen time and social or entertainment focused screen time, but my concern here is that all of this is habit forming, all of this time is spent looking a pixels and not at the world. This is habit forming and habit reinforcing. Districts like mine with technology in each classroom can modulate the time a bit more than districts using 1:1. (Incidentally, my son’s teachers sent pictures of students working in science since the weather turned and one of the pictures was of students working outside— laying on the grass, starting into laptops). Am I a luddite, or a sentimentalist to see this as problematic? Perhaps.

In the age of school shootings and bullying, how often do we require students to look each other in the eye? What happens when schools re-enforce dangerous habits, even with quality experiences? Not all screen time is created equal, but if we condition students to look for all answers between the frame of a computer or phone screen what are they missing? What are they not seeing outside or in a text? What exercise is their brain not getting?

How can students move past the pull of “likes” and other forms of instant gratification generating dopamine in their minds? I don’t know, and like my other posts on this topic the more I write the more questions and concerns and complex problems I find.

One next step: I’m going to learn from my students. I’ve decided to run a “language of social media” unit in my AP Language class after the exam. The students are going to lead it—I don’t use social media. And I’m working on developing some questions and frameworks to get us started at the end of May. They are smart. It should be fun.