Students increasingly are addicted to smartphones
Directions: Read and at the “Checkpoint” questions, write your own short answer. You do not need to write in complete sentences.
Nearly every high school student has a smartphone available during school hours, and as an educator I am troubled by the resulting behaviors: a compulsive need to be online and have access to devices, disinterest in activities that don’t involve a smartphone, unwillingness to leave the device to attend to class assignments, using the phones for primary communication to sustain friendships, irritability or lethargy when not engaged in technology. Students even request restroom passes as a cover to use their phones.
- List the types of behaviors this educator observes in her classroom as a result of smartphone usage:
Psychiatrists say that “internet use disorder” affects the connections between the areas of the brain that control attention, executive control and emotion processing (all important for learning and socialization) in the same way alcohol and drugs do. Someone with this disorder will be preoccupied with the internet and experience physical, emotional and behavioral withdrawal if it is removed.
- What type of symptoms result from “withdrawal” of having the phone taken away?
If the Spring Valley High School student who was removed from the classroom had the propensity to be belligerent, and you add to that a smartphone addiction, her response was assured: When asked to put the phone away, she was physiologically, emotionally and behaviorally unable to do so.
We as a society must be of one accord (agreement): We must require students to leave the phones at home or else find a way to block their use at school. Students do not need phones to learn or socialize. Access to the internet at school should be directed by the teacher. If a need arises to communicate, parents and students can use the school phone.Our children need us to take control. Their future depends on it.
- Do you believe, as the editorial says, “our children need us to take control”, or do you believe the children should be trusted to have this control over phone usage during school?
…continue to next page for a group activity
How Your Brain Learns: A Lesson on Dividing Attention
“The teenage brain between the ages of 13 and 18 experiences a “pruning phase” similar to the phase that happens from birth to 6 years old. This means teen brains act a bit like a sponge; it can soak up new information and change to make room for new data (“pruning” or discarding skills and information that don’t get used), a concept known as plasticity. This means that new information is “soaked up” in the teen brain much easier than in an adult brain. Ever heard the expression “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks”? That just means it’s much more difficult to learn new things after the teenage years, as the brain doesn’t absorb new information as easily.
Plasticity can also help teens pick up new skills much more quickly than adults. The teen years may be the time when potential poets start scribbling furiously in notebooks and future hoops heroes start really hitting their shots. But beware, teens…you’re brain is in a “use it or lose it” growth period. Since it’s busy soaking up so much new information and skills, parts of the brain you don’t activate are essentially discarded to make way for all this new data. Think about this next time you decide to build the skill of sleep and laziness instead of thinking and creativity. You could be losing those skills forever!
Now let’s have some fun learning about how your brain learns!
DO NOT START THE INSTRUCTIONS BELOW UNTIL YOUR TEACHER STARTS THE TIMER.
Task 1: Below is a nursery rhyme. Your task is to count how many vowels it contains (A, E, I, O, U). You must do this in complete silence and as quickly as possible only when the teacher starts the timer. Raise your hand when you’ve written down the answer.
Twinkle twinkle little star,
How I wonder what you are.
Up above the world so high,
Like a diamond in the sky.
Twinkle twinkle little star,
How I wonder what you are.
How many did you count? ______
Take 2: When time starts, count the vowels from the next nursery rhyme below when time starts, this time with a conversation playing in the background. Again, raise your hand once you’ve got the answer:
Oh, The grand old Duke of York,
He had ten thousand men;
He marched them up to the top of the hill,
And he marched them down again.
And when they were up, they were up,
And when they were down, they were down.
How many did you count? ______
What does this demonstrate to you about our brain’s ability to divide attention? The task is especially difficult while listening to a conversation because both tasks activate the part of our brain’s that process language. (the number of vowels in the rhyme’s have no effect on the outcome of the experiment. Multi-tasking IS possible, but our brains do struggle to divide our attention effectively. You need to focus soley only learning, and why your attention is torn by teen hormones, lack of sleep, a poor diet, stress…the ONE thing you DO have full control over is staying off your phone while learning. Don’t add another distraction. Put the phone away!