We might as well have marched into school this year wearing boots, belts and cowboy hats to the theme of Sergio Leone’s “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” because, boy, we walked into a showdown. With our phones holstered faithfully to our hips, the anticipatory twitch of students’ fingers itching to whip out their weapons was undeniably present. The pesky law enforcement, the faculty, had other plans. Quick to the draw, they subdued our misfit ways with the new law o’ the land: no more cell phones.
But of course, this is no Western movie and the stakes are far lower, so why does this policy feel so dramatic?
I think it is due to the addiction most students have to their screens. Students have developed a dependence on their phones whether actively using them or just feeling them in their pockets, so the absence of them results in symptoms of withdrawal. Many students reported feelings of craving, restlessness and frustration in the first days back, counting down the minutes to their next dopamine hit.
With this in mind, I have to wonder if the current policy is going about treatment correctly. It is fine to make a policy, but subsequent student reactions must be considered, and I am not sure that students are becoming any less fixated on their screens. It is hard to say exactly how this rule will affect students’ relationships with their phones over time, but I predict that many students will adapt, and their dependence will decrease. Already, I hear less complaints from students and see little to no correction from teachers.
I attribute this to the fact that the policy is not actually that hard to follow. Whittled down, all it states is that phones cannot be seen or used during the school day except during the after lunch break and in high school open hours. Hypothetically, this means that, except for those times, phones rest patiently in backpacks. For those that need to feel their phone and therefore carry it around, they simply place their technology in classroom receptacles during classes. Perhaps I am in the minority here, but is that not overwhelmingly straight forward?
In the context of real life, this is essentially already standard operating procedure. A school is a workplace, and many consider the time and effort expended as a “student” equivalent to that of a profession. No matter where you work these days, there is almost certainly a cell phone policy, most of which prohibit the use of phones entirely. In this sense, Seabury dodges regular expectations and stands as an outlier.
With a relatively benign system, there is work to be done to convey that it is, indeed, benign. The language used in regard to the cell phone policy quickly became negatively connotated. Terms like “phone jail” and “Cell Phone Commandments” paint the rules as supreme laws and religious requirements, making missteps out as transgressions and sins. Instead we should use standard language to describe standard rules. Ideally, this policy blends into routine and begins to feel normal, but to achieve this, it must be treated normally.
Students, I promise you still have free will, you will always be a cowboy in my heart and nobody is making you cheer “Yee-haw!” for this new rule, but maybe it is time we get off our high horse and submit to this exercise of self-control.
