Teaching Devices

My first day teaching at a pretty rough high school in Brooklyn in the early 90s was as a substitute for a physics class. My stress level was high for three key reasons. First, I don’t understand physics. Second, when my students learned they had a sub, more than half of them cheered and left the classroom. Third, the teacher I was filling in for was out because, the day before, he had been stabbed in the hand while trying to confiscate a student’s Walkman. (In the business, we call this a teachable moment.) So, when it comes to the stress devices at school can cause teachers, I was ahead of my time. Of course, today’s teachers are faced with classrooms filled with social-media addicted students thumbing their iPhones all day long. What would happen if schools tried to take them away? (Note: I am no longer available to sub.) NYT (Gift Article): This Florida School District Banned Cellphones. Here’s What Happened. One teacher explained how bad things were getting. “‘It was getting out of hand,’ Ms. Rodriquez-Davis said, describing how students texted each other during class to arrange meetings in the bathroom, where they filmed dance videos. ‘I call them ‘Toilet TikToks.'” To show what teachers were up against, Ms. Rodriguez-Davis posted her own TikToks parodying her struggles with students and their phones.” (This roughly mirrors my strategy when it comes to my kids’ phone use. I parody them by using mine all day long. So far, the irony seems lost on them. Though that’s just a guess—we haven’t really had a chance to talk in person.)

+ It “has become — by a wide margin — America’s fastest-growing form of education, as families from Upper Manhattan to Eastern Kentucky embrace a largely unregulated practice once confined to the ideological fringe.” WaPo (Gift Article): Home schooling’s rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education. (So do instructors take away their landlines?)