‘We know TikTok is bad for us, but it’s better than the real world.”
These were the words of one of my ninth-grade student, a tall, skinny teenager with thick black glasses. He announced this to our freshman English class on the last day of school last spring.
We were having a classroom discussion about their futures. Some mentioned taking health and driver’s education in summer school; others mentioned jobs at the beach and community center.
“But I’m worried about our future down the road,” the student added, gesturing toward an unseen horizon.
He went into a litany of reasons for his despondency: the pandemic, the increase in school shootings and gun violence, the erosion of social service budgets, the current and future dangers of climate change, the divided nature of politics in America, global conflicts, the stress of standardized testing, the escalation of mental health crises among his generation, and the debates about what should and should not be taught in schools.
Yet as I looked out at the class, 90 percent of whom were on phones, an additional concern about their future became clear. It was right there, in the students’ hands.
I’m about to begin my 20th year teaching high school English, and I’m increasingly concerned about the implications of teaching to a digitally dependent generation of teenagers. The phones ring, buzz, vibrate and flash, constantly luring students away from their physical academic setting into a virtual loop of TikTok videos, Snapchat messages and barrages of targeted advertisements for food delivery and teen fashion.
Many schools have cellphone policies, but these are difficult to enforce. Teachers who do try to limit phone use in class plead, beg, bargain and offer well-researched statistics, candy and extra credit.
Others collect phones in baskets or shoe cubbies. I tried these things for years. I also attempted, as many teachers do, to make phones part of the curriculum, designing lessons that use apps. These lessons are fun, but they occur in between dozens of notifications invading students’ phones every minute. The issue isn’t phones. The issue is dependence on social media apps streaming through phones.
Constant intrusion
The irony is teenagers don’t want to be using social media as much as they are.
A Pew Research Center report from 2018 disclosed that 54 percent of teens said they spend too much time on their phones, and 60 percent said being online all the time is a major problem for them. Unsurprisingly, their feelings post-pandemic have worsened.
Some students try to put their phones away. But soon, they fidget and twitch. The phones are back on desks, hidden in books or behind school-issued Chromebooks. (A screen behind a screen!)
Teens today certainly aren’t the first to sneak something behind a book. When I was in high school, we hid comic books behind texts we read, passed notes and threw paper airplanes. But we weren’t addicted to something that prevented us from learning. We weren’t connected to a bottomless, kaleidoscopic virtual loop that makes us feel worse about ourselves — in a world that’s already given us too much to worry about.
Parents need to do their part, too. Many of my students frequently receive texts and calls from their parents during class, who seem to believe their kid should be accessible to them any second of the school day. Yet, parents seem to be surprised to hear that their child is on their phone during class.
The constant intrusion prevents teenagers from the necessary individuation schools are supposed to provide and inhibits them from discovering themselves — from finding a place for themselves in the future my student said he’s concerned about.
There’s a difference between technologies of connection and technologies of distraction.
School is a space for students to explore and debate ideas, formulate and defend arguments. These skills take time to build. The longer students are using social media apps in the classroom, the harder it will be for them to learn and grow.
We are back in person for another school year. I am trying to make a better world for my students, to help them build a future that will survive the concerns my student was worried about. A future that will last longer than any TikTok loop.
