Lucy Lee, Reporter
@lucyleecourant
Phones are a pivotal part of a teens’ life, both inside and out of school. High schoolers spend hours upon hours scrolling through social media, text messages and emails. Despite the enormous amount of time students spend on their phones, they may not know the detrimental effects it has on school performance.
Phones can be a massive distraction for students. “I don’t think they should be allowed at school, they should be put in lockers or backpacks,” school counselor, Jane Mitchell said. “I understand that in an emergency they can be very useful, but that’s pretty much it.”
Recently, Principal Egan has employed the mandatory use of cell phone caddies in classrooms to prevent students from using their phones during classes, however, students have been disregarding this school rule and using their cellular devices in class.
Ms. Mitchell thinks it’s important for students to think twice before communicating digitally, “I’d like to think that when people are on their cell phones and are typing messages to friends, they look at the message they were typing and were trying to think about the reaction it might cause of the person who is going to read it, because I definitely think it can lead to a very difficult situation,” she said. “Sometimes when people use their cellphones, they don’t have the time to reflect on what this might do to the person receiving it.”
Science teacher, Linda Brooks, thinks having students put phones in the caddy to create a better learning environment for students. “Phones affect retention of information. They’ve done a study at Stanford University where students worked to find information, and they remembered it better. But the students who just googled it forgot the answer,” she said. “There has been a diminishiment in memory retention and information retention.”
Ms. Brooks, who has read many studies and cases regarding the effect of cell phones in relation to the teen brain, shared some extremely interesting research conducted. She said, “There have been studies on the effects of cellphones ringing, and they measured cortisol (a stress hormone) in students’ saliva, when they heard their phone ring, they actually had in increase in cortisol. This might be responsible for some teen obesity, because cortisol makes you retain weight”
Ms. Brooks thinks limiting screen time is especially important for parents with young children. “If parents can limit the amount of time their kids spend on a device that would require parents to spend time with their children, introducing them to museums activities, things like that” She said, “It puts a burden on the community to find entertainment. We need more of an emphasis on human contact and community.”
In School Nurse Betsy Imbrogno’s opinion, cell phones pose as a distraction to students, and have caused a change in how students communicate with one another. She said, “For a younger generation, phones takes away from learning how to communicate with people.”
Can the amount of hours teens spend on their phone be controlled? Nurse Imbrogno has expressed the fact that the responsibility lies with the parents of these adolescents. “It’s teaching kids how to put it down and be present and be aware, there are times and places for it,” she said. “I think it’s a big teaching area for parents.”
