Member-only story
Teachers and School Administrators Need to Stop Confiscating Smartphones, Smart Watches, and Earbuds
It’s time to surrender — a purposefully provocative proposition…
How dare we as a nation blame our teachers for the fact that many of our students are so hopelessly addicted to their screens — including smartphones, smartwatches, and other emerging internet-infused technologies — that they rebel — violently sometimes — when asked to put them away and read a book or memorize multiplication tables.
To be historical, in the 1960s and ’70s — when the highest level of technology was a Texas instrument calculator that could add, subtract, and divide — teachers could police this new plastic box by allowing it to be used on certain tests and not others. Additionally, a teacher could say, with a straight face, that we needed more than a calculator to succeed in life.
Whether we like it or not, the technology available in our smartphones is perfectly capable of answering any question on any test in any school college, or university, with nearly 100% accuracy with no effort whatsoever on the part of the student.
This is a difficult fact to accept and face.
It is now profoundly asinine, stupid, and grossly unfair, to force an 8-year-old to sit at a wooden desk in a cramped classroom…
