An ever-growing frustration, and a barrier to teaching: Cellphones in the classroom

I am leaving Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) after teaching high school math for 12 years, the entirety of my career. There are a lot of positive reasons that I am choosing to move on and try something new. But I would like to share one area in which I have experienced great and ever-growing frustration during my time in the classroom.

Cellphones have become ubiquitous in society, and likewise in our classrooms. As a teacher and as a parent of three young daughters, I have grave concern over the future trajectory of the effects these technologies will have on young minds.

Cellphones are ever-present in classrooms despite most teachers' best efforts to manage the distractions they cause. I am frustrated that MPS seems to have no clear plan regarding how teachers and administrators should be dealing with them. We are forced to choose between tolerating them at the expense of a child's learning or taking a hard-line stance that compromises student/teacher relationships.

When I started my career, there were occasions when I'd catch a kid listening to a Discman or playing a Gameboy. These devices were immediately confiscated and treated as transgressions that needed to be addressed. We did this because we knew then, as we know now, that these kinds of constant and pervasive distractions are bad for learning.

Cellphones are everywhere and teachers feel helpless. It was around the time I decided to leave MPS that I had an impactful experience. I was in front of a group of 10th-grade geometry students (challenging enough in its own right) when I asked a student for the third time to put her phone away. A thought struck me: "I am going to have to address cellphones during every hour of every day for the remaining 30-plus years of my career." I can't adequately express how deflating this realization was for me.

While nearly all of our students have cellphones and know their proper use, there are a percentage of our kids who are addicted to their phones. They experience anxiety when a device is not near. They lash out when told phones are prohibited.

These students cause huge learning problems for the rest of their classmates. Teachers, if they are doing their job properly, are spending far too much time dealing with a handful of students incapable of unplugging.

Our kids are looking to us for guidance in navigating the world around them. We do a good job most of the time. But we are failing our students and their families in not being more proactive around building healthy relationships to technology.

Joe Henry, of Minneapolis, is a teacher.