Toronto School Board Bans Notebooks From Classrooms
Crazy title right? Read on.
When was the last time someone took away your notebook? That piece of paper you were doodling on? What about a textbook? Dictionary? You turned out the way you did because you had your thesaurus taken away? Shame. If a teacher took away your child’s notebook, or a dictionary and said that they were being distracted by it, how would you respond? Likely you’d be upset — dictionaries and notebooks are learning tools, essential to learning. Now imagine that your child was passing notes in their notebook around the class? Would said teacher be justified in removing it then? As a parent I would freak. You can’t take away a learning tool; clearly there’s a classroom management issue that the teacher must fix. They shouldn’t be taking away student’s learning tools. They should be focusing my efforts on the root cause of the issue. If students feel the need to goof off during class, and short of a student with an IEP , that fault falls squarely on the teacher for not engaging students.
Now let’s change the issue at hand from dictionaries, notebooks, thesauri, and from textbooks to the entirely non-related cell phones. Some of you may see where I’m going with this but hang tight because today (February 22nd) Earl Grey Public School in Toronto banned the use of cellphones in classrooms. Let that sink in. A school in 2017 banned cell phones. Students claim the ban was brought down because they were using them in and out of class and they provided distractions to learning. The CBC published an article on February 22nd, 2017 — Toronto School Bans Cellphone from Class to Dial Back on Distraction, which attributed the ban to students playing games on their phones in the washrooms and texting during instructional time — a move which was pushed by parents. The same parents who would be up in arms if a school banned notebooks because students could write gossipy notes in them, or who would dare remove tried and true paper editions of dictionaries from classrooms. It is concerning that parents of students born into, and living fully immersed in the 21st century are willing to so quickly remove a tool with limitless learning potential because students are distracted by it. Now imagine if that headline had read that the Toronto School Board Bans Notebooks from Class to Dial Back on Distraction.
The blame for students texting in class could fall on the students — at a certain age you have to differentiate between social and study time — but can I really blame them when I see lecture halls filled with university age students who are still not able to disconnect from their cellphones for an hour and a half long class twice a week. It could fall on the parents for not teaching students to disconnect themselves from their digital life — but can these generations teach students to disconnect from a position of technological disadvantage? They truly do not see the need for reliance on technology. We could blame the administration for allowing students to be stripped of an educational resource — one provided at no cost to the school boards. Or we could place the blame where it really lies — in teachers who see technology (cellphones in particular) as nothing more than something they do not have to adapt to.
Dear Educators, it’s high time to wake up and accept: that students have cellphones and they are going nowhere, that a cellphone is an educational tool and not simply a tier in your discipline checklist, and that students know more about it than you do so fighting it only delays the inevitable. Cell phones are here to stay — time to get on the bandwagon or get left behind in the dust.
Do you know why I think the students are Earl Grey Public School text in class? Play games in the bathroom? When I was in school — elementary and university — and I wasn’t engaged in the class discussions I would tune out. Whether that meant putting my head down, reading the back of my water bottle for the 3rd time that week, drawing cubes on a piece of lined paper. I still do these things, these unobtrusive things that do not detract from the content but allowed me to stay sane during some extremely boring lessons. Tell me this: what is the practical difference between focusing and doodling on a piece of paper and texting someone? Doing 30 seconds of a game on my phone? Yes the text message could distract another student, but what if, and this is a huge if in these cell-phone free classrooms the recipient of the text message was fully engaged in the lesson? Oh my. We just had a student text, not disrupt anyone. Someone get the detectives in here: something smells fishy.
Students are not being engaged in their classes and that’s worrisome. Teachers have a duty to educate kids, and that can only be achieved if students are learning and listening in class. It is the responsibility of the teacher to ensure that every student in their classroom is able to learn the content in their own way — if need be — through means that best suit them.
I challenge, no I beg, teachers to find ways to include cellphones in their class instead of choosing the nuclear option and removing them. We’d all think twice before asking the administration — especially when demanded by parents — to ban paper notebooks in classrooms. Now is the time to take a long hard look at which side of the digital divide you want to end up on.
Source: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/earl-grey-public-school-cell-phones-1.3992597