Kansas cellphone ban leans on legislators, rather than learning
By: Eric Thomas
When Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly signed into law the banning of cellphones in the state’s K-12 schools, she — along with the Legislature — sent a suitably belittling message: Cellphones are too big a problem for our educators.
As a former high school teacher and a current lecturer at the University of Kansas, I take that new law as a personal slight, while understanding that smartphones are mauling our classrooms.
Across Kansas each school day, teachers tackle all kinds of behavioral challenges. A high school senior lashes out violently. A middle schooler makes a cruel sexual joke. A fourth grader steals a pen from the teacher’s desk. A group of sophomores mocks a freshman in the hallway.
While not perfect at solving these problems, Kansas teachers try and succeed well enough that lawmakers don’t become involved.
The problem of cellphones, however, has bedeviled our schools to the point of relying on Topeka’s elected politicians.
Why have we educators surrendered to the cellphone?
Undoing cellphone behavior
Memorizing was never easy for me. If I stored away even a short aphorism, I find it terribly important. In studying for my master’s degree in education, I found a gem that I parrot back to my teaching assistants each semester:
Learning is changed behavior.
A student can’t write a sentence? A student can’t balance a chemistry equation? A student can’t shoot a sharp photograph? A student can’t use Adobe Premiere to create an animated keyframe effect that gradually changes the video’s opacity and saturation?
As a teacher, I will help each student change those behaviors. Except chemistry.
When learning to write a sentence, the student’s behavior will change from shrugging (which is certainly a behavior) to smiling and writing, “My teacher is a hero.”
Why can’t the same learning happen with cellphones? You can’t attend my 75-minute class without being distracted by the phone you brought to school?
As a teacher, I should be able to fix that too.
The best educators know the levers of learning, how to pull them and when. We know about positive punishment, negative punishment, reward systems, social learning, modeling and more. We know that learning becomes more profound if students understand the context and eventual application of the facts. We teachers know all of this and more.
Yet, cellphones are too powerful for us to manage, administer and police in our classrooms. The new Kansas law is a wilting acknowledgement of that.
Student cellphones have been present in American schools for decades. I remember my high school students in the early 2000s boasting about how they could text — on an alphanumeric keypad! — from inside their pocket during class. That means they would mash “9” three times, “3” twice and “7” three times, just to reply “yes.” All without looking.
Even though we had more than 20 years of warning that a toxic wave was cresting above our heads, schools were mostly passive. Today, teachers consider themselves bold if they hang a cellphone organizer on their door, requiring that everyone deposit a phone in an assigned pocket. (Some students slide a deactivated phone in the slot and keep their real one.)
Interventionally speaking, the last two decades in education was a series of flimsy jabs when we were in the ring with a hungry Bengal tiger.
Cellphones are formidably addictive, reinforcing young people with small hits of dopamine via social media and more. One of my students last year reported spending 16 hours on her phone during a snow day. Yikes.
Consider also how distracting they are. I graduated high school in the 1990s. Having a smartphone in my pocket in 1995 would have been the equivalent of me carrying the following items into my first-period class: a television, a newspaper, my parents, my girlfriend who was in another class, my video game console and a smutty magazine.
With that said, am I being unreasonable by urging Kansas teachers to spar with that angry tiger? I don’t think so.
There are things that work for me in my classrooms at KU and when I speak to high school audiences. A few weeks ago, I presented some of these ideas along with two other instructors at the university’s Center for Teaching Excellence.
Eric Thomas teaches visual journalism and photojournalism at the William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. He is the former director of the Jayhawk Media Workshop and former executive director of the Kansas Scholastic Press Association, a nonprofit that supports student journalism throughout the state.