With the new generations growing up with more electronics, it makes sense to have cell phones on you and in every part of our lives as that’s our communication and lifeline. If you think about it, this new law is more harmful to the newer generations, and it is a little weird why they don’t want us to have them.
I understand; you don’t want your students to be distracted and not learn anything. Yes, there must be some action, but I believe this approach is not the best.
It is not the best way because dangers can occur during school sessions; sometimes, the schools don’t do much about it. For example, there was a bomb threat this year, and my parents were not informed of it until students heard about it from overhearing other conversations with teachers and other students. The automated voice message did not reach my parents until a day later.
Is it weird that the government is pushing a cell phone ban on students? Are we supposed to have no outside contact with people? Are we supposed to trust it upon other people to tell parents when I could quickly inform them? Why does it seem more like a prison than a learning building?
We should have cell phones because they capture our daily lives and carry thousands of memories for us! Without cell phones, we would have almost nothing in school.
Practically every school requires you to use your phone to do school work. They ask you to sign up for apps to receive daily reminders for school activities. What would be the point of signing up for these apps and online places on your phone and being unable to use them throughout the day?
School is about expressing creativity and looking into the future. Well the future is technology but with this phone ban we are removing technology, we are going back in time instead of forward. To do something like this is almost impossible as schools would have to rethink different teaching plans because a lot of them require the students to use their mobile devices.
It is not always about what happens if there are emergencies; it’s more about how the students will be affected by this and how this will cut communication between students and parents or other family members. The excuse that the school makes is, “The parent or guardian can call the school if a family emergency is happening or if you need to talk to them.” Not everything should go through the school; in a way, it should be classified as an invasion of privacy because they do not need to know every detail.
If you genuinely want what’s best for the students, you would know by now that this law is no good or any law like it.
– by D. Harker (11th) Panguitch
Read more about how cell phone use can be instrumental in the classroom in Cell Phones Are Tools for Good by B. Black.