Graphic by Violet Pody

As second-semester approaches, some teachers are turning to stricter phone policies to crack down on excessive in-class phone use.

Along with fellow Garfield teachers Ms. Savoie and Mr. Gish, Mr. Lovre plans to introduce new restrictions on phone use in his classes. Students in his class will put their phones in a “locking cabinet” for the duration of the class period. If Mr. Lovre sees a phone in use, “it’s going to be a parent call,” he said. His “despair over the impact of phones,” from their impact on learning to socialization, has reached a boiling point. “At this point, it’s half about class and half about how students are in the classroom just as people… So, that drove me to want to do something more.”

After quarantine, Mr. Lovre said students came back wanting to “deal with screens instead of having to deal with the discomfort of: ‘Oh my gosh, I’ve been put at a table with five strangers in my class, and now they’re going to make us play a dumb game.’” Phones are “this tool that makes further isolation easier,” he said. “Every app has many, many engineers who are only paid to [make apps] more addictive and interesting than everything else. I can’t compete with that.”

“I’m sort of relieved,” he admitted. “For several years, I had this attitude where teachers would say cell phones are out of control, and I’d be like, ‘Well, you must not be a very good teacher, because you can just manage [it].’ And [I’ve realized] there’s real limits to that.”

In reaction to the new policy, “some people showed no emotion in hearing it and some people gasped,” Mr. Lovre’s student teacher said.

And to students who don’t like this change? Mr. Lovre jokingly yet bluntly advised: “Get over it.”

But not every teacher is striving to curtail in-class phone use. Mr. Waterman said he will continue to “allow people to use phones as long as they are not making noise or being used to harass people in the class.” Many people use their phone as a calculator or to listen to music and are “pretty responsible about staying focused,” he said. “The people [who] are distracted… if you didn’t allow them to be on their phone, it doesn’t necessarily guarantee they’re going to start working. They’re probably going to find another way to be distracted.”

Senior Julia Heron-Watts offers a student’s perspective on phone use at Garfield. Students are “not able to fully participate and engage in learning the material because they’re on their phones,” she said. But, Heron-Watts added, “If [teachers] are going on a five-minute rant about using phones, it’s five minutes that we can’t be doing work.” When a student is on their phone, “that’s an individual action, and it doesn’t affect the class… And so, I don’t think it’s fair for teachers to rant about being disruptive when [they’re] disrupting.”

Nowadays, phones are “almost a necessity,” Mr. Waterman concluded. “It’s more about school failing to adapt to this very clear change in lifestyle and not figuring out a way to work with it… It would be much smarter to find a way to make [phone use] effective as opposed to it being a continuous enemy.”