"We would be bad adults if we put the phones back in their hands,” said Matthew Kay, a teacher at Science Leadership Academy, a magnet school in Philadelphia.
“I’d say, ‘I gave you a week-and-a-half, and you only have a paragraph written. What’s going on?’” Kay said. Eventually, Kay and a colleague began talking about taking phones away for real, having kids slide them into numbered pouches hanging near the door when they walked in. If the whole ninth-grade team did it together, then “none of us was that teacher,” Kay said.‘When we have our phones, we’re not really paying attention.’
He expected pushback — from parents and especially from students. But he got thank-you emails from parents, and students were “less spicy” than he expected, Kay said. On Day 1, some students brought in a second phone; Kay teased them about their burner phones and the end-runs around the rule died out within a day.
“It helped me focus more in class. I was more focused on my work. I think I have gotten more engaged in my work.”“When we have our phones, we’re not really paying attention to our teachers,” said Grant, 15. “Now, I got to know a lot of my classmates better.”, author Jonathan Haidt argues that the “phone-based childhood” has replaced “play-based childhood” and is causing widespread mental health issues among youth, among other issues. That matched what Kay was seeing in class.