Teacher quits because of excessive cell phone use in schools.

NPR:

He was a high school biology teacher in Tucson, Ariz. and his students' near-constant smartphone use was taking a toll on his well-being. So when summer rolled around after his eleventh year in the classroom — he quit.

"I came to realize that the phone addiction that the students were struggling with was causing severe mental health problems for me, preventing me from being a good husband," Rutherford said.

During the 2023-2024 academic year, Rutherford says his students were significantly more disengaged. He felt like he wasn't making a difference.

"Most of the people in the class, they've got their headphones in, they've got their phones on. They're not actually listening," Rutherford said.

He says that as a teacher with ADHD, he fed off the energy of his class.

"I'm really aware of whether someone's listening to me or paying attention to me." Rutherford said. "And this year," he told NPR at the end of the 2023-2024 school year, "I was just like, 'I can't…They're not interested in what I have to say.' And that, frankly, is the reason that I had to leave."

To further compound children’s decreasing mental state, let’s hyperfocus on their emotional states, always reminding them of their “issues and problems,” leading to worsening symptoms:

In addition to the phone use, students were not interacting with each other, sometimes writing in journal entries that they were anxious, depressed and lonely — which made them burrow further into their devices, Rutherford said.

What happens to students if you have a partial phone ban? Another teacher in Minnesota describes the situation:

Right after it went into effect, she noticed students were more engaged and some admitted in feedback forms they appreciated it.

"[It] forced them to kind of learn how to socialize again, how to be entertained by each other, how to turn toward the learning, even in moments of silence, even in moments of boredom," Brisse said.

It's not a bell-to-bell policy — but Brisse is OK with that. Although they are on their phones during passing periods, she said "there's plenty of chatter in the hallways" as well.

What happens if you have a full ban, where students hand in their phones at the beginning of the day, and receive their phones near the end of the school day?

Since 2018, her school has collected students' phones every morning as they come into the building. The phones are returned during the last hour of the day.

"The students are focused. There's still definitely lots of chatting, lots of relationship building," Osborn said. "I've also found that students are more willing to work together in groups when they don't have their cell phones."

At the end of the day when the cell phone bin is delivered to class, Osborn says students crowd around it "like vultures."

Once the phones are passed back to students, she says they immediately look at them. In her view, that shows that "they don't have the self-control to be able to handle the demands of school and access to a cell phone."

They benefit from not having to think about their phones the entire day.

Having little to no phone exposure during class leads to increased productivity, better mental health, and less expenditure on mental health resources. These resources can then be used to actually develop productive programs instead of constantly funding the mental health conglomerate that is artificially induced by social media.

Hopefully more schools adopt the full ban.