Memes

Wrong. Get off the phone.

School will never be as interesting as a phone. Your teacher will never be as entertaining as an influencer. Your textbooks will never be as entertaining as your feed. What families and teenagers have to understand is that education is a choice. If you want to learn, you’ll probably have to put your phone down for long periods of time to actively listen and learn. It’s difficult. It tires you out. It’ll frustrate you. But you will eventually learn.

Then again - when I look at home prices and inflation, I understand young people’s feelings of futility.

Good luck young people. I’m really rooting for you to figure this out.

The amount of times I told my students they can use their phone for certain exercises, then 90% of them just went on Tiktok or played Clash Of Clans, is why is started not allowing phones.

I get that to the 10% it was super helpful but it's just easier to not allow everyone.

I can try to make the material interesting and be engaging but if you're watching Overwatch on your phone all of that is a moot point.

I mean it kind of needs to be both. But it’s hard to find a compelling reason why kids need their smartphones fully accessible during class.

"oh no i cannot play on my phone, how could school be so cruel"

OP take a look back at this in about 5-10 years and realize how monumentally ignorant it is.

Multiple studies have shown that smartphone decrease concentration, and have negative impact on emotional well being in adolescents.

The mere presence of a smartphone reduces basal attentional performance https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-36256-4

Brain Drain: The Mere Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/691462

Attention or Distraction? The Impact of Mobile Phone on Users' Psychological Well-Being https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8093572/

Mobile phone use, behavioural problems and concentration capacity in adolescents: A prospective study https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1438463916300645

What would you prefer the school do?

How could they motivate you to actually pay attention in class instead of playing with your phone? Honestly ask yourself if this "addressing motivation" would make geometry more interesting than tiktok.

I agree that the school environment should be more motivating, but there's no way to compete with apps and games designed to be addictive, even adults have trouble avoiding their phones at work.

Even before phones schools were like this. But they'd just put you in mandatory extra classes to fix your grades. Instead of, you know, talking to you. To get to know how you are doing and how you're feeling.

I've hated my school time and all it taught me is teachers are obsessed with having power over others. Maybe not all teachers, but a lot are like this. They won't listen to you, they just force their opinion on you. And if you don't do well in their pre-made lecturing framework then it's on you because you don't pay attention and you are lazy. It's never on them.

If schools only focused on what students were motivated to learn, I'm not sure schools would really be accomplishing much. Not to say that schools shouldn't foster motivation in students. Just that technology, especially social media, is very effective at distracting people.

Yeah, the second one will directly affect the first one positively. Essentially, school work needs to be the most interesting thing you can do in school, otherwise you will have low motivation. It's not the job of the the school staff to make the material extremely interesting, it's their job to remove every more interesting thing from the reach of students.

Read up on dopamine if you didn't understand that.

(And yes, this affects adults too)

The motivation problem isn't the school's fault, it's yours. You choose to not want to learn.

Phones certainly decrease our level of motivation by decreasing our dopamine baseline. Huberman Labs episodes addressing dopamine are really interesting