Want to help your kids do well at school? Stop Texting Them!
Dear Parents of High School Students,
It’s 2019 and pretty much every high school student in America now has their own cell phone. While there are benefits to this trend, like the ability to instantly look up the origin of the word apocalypse or the year Calvin Coolidge died, phones have also changed you students’ experience in high school.
Lots of people are researching, studying and writing about the effects of social media and apps like Snapchat and Tumblr, so I’m going to leave those alone for now. What I want to do right now is ask all of you loving, attentive and wonderful parents to stop texting your kids between the hours of 8am and 3pm.
I wish I could say that kids don’t use their phones in my classroom — because it’s against the rules or because my classes are so engaging that students focus and forget about that buzzing little box of data in their pockets — but that’s simply not true. Teachers that claim that kids don’t text in their classrooms are either very out of touch or just plain lying.
This said, I do work hard to keep my kids hands and minds on what we are doing in class. I am constantly experimenting with polite requests, sarcasm, nagging, light embarrassment and guilting kids all in the name of getting them to put their phones away. Although…
