Cringe Core

a young curmudgeon’s take on cell phones in the classroom

I wish I had said: “I’m not the target audience, anymore.” I am also thankful that I didn’t say that out loud and kept the idea to myself. The comment would have fallen on deaf ears. It’s not that they weren’t listening to me. But also the truth is that they weren’t actually listening to me. I’m giving you, the reader, the runaround (just a little bit) because I am endlessly trying to screw my head back on after challenging my Providence Public High School students to engage with some of the material I have introduced to them over the last handful of weeks. 

    I’m the English teacher. I’m the young(ish) English teacher. I’m the English teacher with long hair and a beard. I’m the English teacher that one of my students endearingly referred to as “cringe.” I’m the English teacher who provokes these student responses because I will say and draw out with great emphasis (and a sardonic glint in my eye): “No Cap.” I’m the English teacher that sees my student buried in their cell phone and says, “it’s giving addiction.” I’m the English teacher that will catch himself saying things like “there is, without question, indubitably and unequivocally, no possible reason why you should be on your cell phone.”

    And yet (and it pains me to be performing this trite get-off-my-lawn’ism), the children in my High School classroom cannot seem to get off their damn cellular telephones. I am not the English teacher that has made a blanket ruling on cell phones in my classroom. I haven’t made it a rule of law where cell phone use is met with swift punishment. I am the English teacher that wants to empower my students to make that decision on their own. I have included links to videos within my course syllabus explaining the product design of a cell phone from a former Google product ethicist. I have included in their syllabus a link to a study indicating lower reading retention rates for those who only read from screens. I print out my course readings and distribute them as paper as much as I can. My policy is “screens when we’re using them. No screens when we’re not.”

    What an uphill climb that is proving to actually be. It is a Sisyphisian effort and it makes perfect sense why some teachers don’t do anything but make a blanket ruling of “no cell phones,” leaving the rest up to punishment and enforcement. I view this issue just a little differently. In fact, the issue of cell phones in the classrooms is, in my opinion, an issue of restorative justice. Yes, restorative justice: that ever-so-popular and bandied-about term that feels slapped onto any-and-all initiatives within urban public education spaces these days. I hear restorative justice practices often enough, yet the term is baked into so much of the bureaucratic layers of education that it feels hollow and misunderstood.  

    The students in my 10th grade English classes are excellent at multi-tasking. They are experts at it. And I tell them as much. They’ll have a song playing, ten apps open, they’re playing some game that requires endless “grinding” to unlock new in-game material, a bunch of tabs open on their Chromebook, holding two separate conversations, switching between Spanish and English, all while finding a meme to send to their best friend and saving enough of themselves to go through the motions of passing in an assignment. It is one of the more impressive “C minus performances” you will ever see. What I have engaged them in over the past few weeks is whether they can do a thing I have begun calling single-tasking: are they capable of sustaining a singular focus on just one thing without distractions for any extended period of time? 

Photo by ROBIN WORRALL on Unsplash

An extended period of time? How long is that? An hour? If only an hour were possible. How about a half hour? That would be nice but I am fairly certain that is not possible. 20 minutes? You’re getting warmer. When I ask my students to follow along with a short 4-minute video and answer some questions while they watch, most of my students won’t last more than one minute before they are drawn back into the world of their phone. I observed the entire time. And I wish I were joking. 

Competition is stiff. I have my voice inside a classroom for one hour a day. I have a bag of time-tested tricks and new tricks I come up with or steal from others. There are assignments, grades, incentives, and rewards. But what they have is an endless trove of entertainment and content, backed and funded by a billion-dollar industry, requesting their eyes at all hours, siphoning off minutes and hours and days of our student’s time and attention. And that device is always monitoring, in real-time, what they press and view and engage with so that it can evolve around what each of them like and dislike, ensuring that the classroom will always be miles behind: boring, straightforward, and irrelevant to each of their individual tastes. 

As the English teacher with long hair and a beard, I feel uniquely prepared to actually combat some of these recent issues. When I was a student in middle school, one of my peers told me to stop bouncing my leg under my desk because I was shaking the whole floor. I have had classic ADD symptoms for as long as I remember, yet I was undiagnosed until the age of 30. I was the student who would write a 3-page paper in the 10 minutes before it was due. The student who couldn’t sit still. The one who endlessly talked back to teachers and relished the opportunity to make my classmates laugh. The one who rarely found the material in school to be worth my time. I was disciplined more than most: suspended, nearly expelled, forever given detention slips. 

However, I think I would prefer the challenge of having 25 versions of me in the classroom as opposed to the 25 individually distracted students. Each student is distracted on their own terms: only capable of pulling themselves from their Individualized Entertainment Program if they have had significant practice in establishing boundaries for themselves. The English teacher will repeat instructions for classwork but each student will take in different fractions of those instructions at different times. The pacing can never be unified because the class isn’t unified. If it happens that the English teacher (through some gargantuan effort) repairs the fracture in the classroom, let's not dismiss the endless appeal over the next hour for each student to dive right back into their distractions at the moment they feel bored or challenged, thus refracturing any classroom unity created. 

Alongside the term single-tasking, I have also been using a term I’ve stolen from an old mentor of mine at UMass Boston: lean forward. This term I use to help my students make the distinction between entertainment and study. We lean back when we’re being entertained or relaxing. We lean forward when we’re studying and learning. Both are rewarding in their own way but it is increasingly difficult to convince my students that there is value in prioritizing their attention onto one single thing, yet alone if that one thing is not intended to entertain them.

Why don’t you just save yourself the effort and make a rule? Why go through all this trouble? I’m an educator. At 33 years old, I’ve been an educator almost as long as I was an employee at a pizza shop. I teach English and what I always loved about taking English classes was that it wasn’t just about words and writing and grammar and spelling and vocabulary. It was an introduction into the liberal arts: the ambiguity of language and human motives and ideas. The strengthening of that muscle which helps us think critically and parse through all of the ways that outside forces can manipulate and coerce us. It liberates, empowers, and gets us to care about the wellbeing of ourselves and others. This is why I go through the trouble. I don’t want to tell my students to get off their phones. That’s indoctrination. I want to give them the tools to make that decision for themselves. 

And I love my phone. I’m finishing this essay after spending a rainy Saturday in sweatpants playing an addictive mobile game. And I also display the habits of my students often - pulled away from the things I need to do by endlessly indulging in distractions like videogames or scrolling social media or listening to a new podcast. My students are not at fault here. My student’s parents or guardians are not at fault. The teachers are not at fault. 

The irony for me, as the English teacher at a Providence Public High School, is that no one is really to blame for how out-of-hand this issue has become. A lot has been made of metrics for student achievement. We throw new platforms, apps, and systems at our students. The intention isn’t wrong. But academics are never going to be able to compete. Even with Google Classroom and Clever and Kahn Academy and StudySync and textbook companies going digital, none of it will ever compete. We’ll have less paper, an easier time grading, and more consistent standards, but we’re still only going to get impressive ‘C-minus performances’ as the students swiftly check off their lists before going back to the device that is clamoring for their attention the whole time.

 I hope by now you’re starting to piece together the restorative justice component within all of this. I hope that I’ve given you enough rope and guided you along so that you’ve reached the conclusion on your own. I imagine that these issues permeate all high schools and classrooms that don’t deploy strict cell phone rules. For schools that serve lower-income students, the challenge is that our low-income students are already outpacing middle-and-upper-income students when it comes to their daily screen time. It serves as a babysitter, a window into experiences they may not imagine possible, their movie theater, their TV, their local zoo, their social time, their family time, their leisure time, their bedtime story. The research is already out there. And the pandemic already increased whatever conclusions were made in 2019. 

Look around at the middle-class adults in your life and you’ll see the effect of screens vis-à-vis the social isolation brought on by the pandemic. Noses are buried in screens. Social anxiety diagnoses are commonplace. Escape is only a passcode away. For the 33 year old English teacher with long hair and a beard, I was a teenager when I got my first cell phone. I know how to use them. I’m savvy enough to fix any problem you may have with it. I have five different email addresses. I have at least as many social media accounts. I’ve live-streamed, edited videos, been the author of numerous blogs, and used Discord. But at this point in my life, just like what I wanted to say to my students but never did: “I’m not the target audience anymore.” Our students, and especially our low-income students? They’re the target audience. And it’s giving addiction.