I keep my phone in a chip bag and only pull it out to LARP the preparation for the assassination Franz Ferdinand in general terms without naming actual places or names.

Hey! Sorry for the delay. I am an infrequent poster at best.

When kids have access to phones, then they want to be on their phones. They rush through their work, don’t pay full attention to their instruction, and have no distance from their friends in which to process their lives.

Rushing through their work and doing a shit job in order to get back on their phone sets up power struggles in the classroom with children who become offended if you tell them that their work is insufficient. Since they were not fully paying attention to the lesson, they have to go back and correct mistakes, which they view as ‘cutting into their time’.

The biggest behavioral impact is that once phones are in the mix, the conversation in the friend group never stops. Arguments continue, jokes continue, complaints continue, and all of this spirals and escalates on itself. Kids get stuck into online arguments with people they then see at lunch. So, you have kids talking mad shit online, creating this culture of anxiety and fear that keeps the students on edge. Grudges continue on for years. Literal years, over stuff that would have been forgotten in a week if it wasn’t constantly recycled in the friend group for content.

Finally, kids who are removed from their phones freak out. That constant conversation that they know is happening is now inaccessible to them, and they know how they talk about each other. Now they have to worry about not knowing who has beef with who, what is being said about them, and not understanding the latest ridiculous meme or joke.

So, in answer to the specific behaviors that cell phones cause, there is no direct answer. Rather, take a school, give bullies access to everyone all the time, amplify every disagreement, argument, or compromising picture or piece of information, add in a constant distraction to the task at hand, which reduces reflection and growth, keep kids in constant contact with their parents and stymying their independent development, and then ask which behaviors are the result of that. Is it the violence? The disrespect? The apathy toward classroom instruction? The anxiety? The reliance on constant reassurance from either looking something up or receiving real time feedback from their parents and friends? It is tough to say.

What is easy to say, based on a lot of experience, is that when you stamp out cellphone culture, everything improves by every metric. Grades go up, discipline goes down, positive interactions with peers and kindness become the norm, and kids are able to just be kids while they are at school.

Incoming spike in suicide rates in 3 … 2 … 1 …

High Risk, No Reward.

I mean, I’ve worked as a teacher for eleven years and I don’t know a single person who doesn’t think that social media contributed to declining behavior standards. When I say, ‘a single person’, I am referring to other teachers or administrators. I am not using hyperbole. Nobody thinks it is good, everyone thinks it’s bad, and every year we tighten the noose.

This is across three school districts and nine grade levels.

So, can we get the link to that report? I know some folks in the executive branch that are acting against Christian interests and should be removed.