As a student, I’ve probably read “no phones allowed in class except for emergencies” in a syllabus probably twenty times in the past couple of semesters. I always laugh at that because I’ve yet to find a professor who actually cares when someone is lost in their devices (I’m guilty of this). Still, the cautionary point is made because of how easy it is to lose ourselves in our phones or laptops, or smartwatches.
An educator named John Warner wrote an article aptly titled “Rethinking My Cell Phone/Computer Policy” in which he discusses just that. Warner discusses how a back-and-forth on Twitter of all places caused him to have an epiphany of sorts. He goes on to explain that he realized college students are adults and that if he wants their respect – and attention – it’s his job as an educator to earn it. Rather than policing cell phone use, he’d prefer to compete with their devices and use that as motivation to simply be more interesting. One line that stuck out to me the most in his article reads, “If I deserve to be ignored, my students should be allowed to ignore me.” I emphasize this line because I’ve had a handful of professors who seemed to be boring themselves over a 75-minute stretch and I couldn’t help but wonder if they enjoyed the material they were teaching.
If John Warner covered respect, then Travis Bradberry covers brain damage when it comes to the use of devices. Beyond that, however, Bradberry discusses the pitfalls of multitasking in general and how the act itself only works to our detriment. As someone who should probably be on Adderall or Ritalin, I know all too well what it’s like to try to accomplish so many things at once and fail at all of them. Bradberry urges readers to slow down and do things one at a time even when it comes to our entertainment such as watching TV and being on our phones the entire time. The brain was never meant to multitask and we shouldn’t force it to.
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