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Ah, student cellphones.

The levels of frustrations, angst, and handwringing about it has reached astronomical proportions and, boy oh boy, I reached peak annoyance with them a couple of years ago.

At that point, we reached a faculty-wide policy that students could not use cellphones in class except with teacher permission, though they could use them in the hallways at lunch.

It wasn’t perfect, but have near-universal enforcement got the problem much more under control.

It began to creep back up as an issue near the beginning of this school year, but I finally worked out a system that seemed to work relatively well for the rest of the year.

Well, I should say I worked out a system that worked well for my IB Theory of Knowledge classes.

It was a mid-level annoyance for the entire year in my ELL Newcomers class but, for the life of me, I still don’t know how to handle it.  Students use their phones often for translation – for reading or writing – and also use Google Translate to communicate with their classmates who have different home languages (which I obviously want to encourage).   And, while their phones are out, Instagram and TikTok call out to them.  It wasn’t a huge classroom problem, but it was an issue for which there is no clear solution – at least there isn’t one that I see.

My TOK classes were a different story.

This was my policy:

• There were three legitimate reasons why students could use cellphones in class – for family, for work or for classwork (or, if they were working independently and wanted to listen to music, one time to quickly set up their music shuffle).
• If students were going to take out their phones during class for one of those reasons, they had to tell me.  They didn’t have to tell me exactly why they were using it (though 90% of the time they did so) – I trusted them.  All they had to say was something like, “Mr. Ferlazzo, I’m taking my phone out.”
• If a student had their phone out and hadn’t told me, they would get a warning.
• After that warning, if it happened again, I would give them a brown paper bag and a piece of tape.  They would have to put their phone in the bag, tape it up, and place it in their backpack.
• I could only use my own cellphone for school business or a personal emergency, and I would have to tell the class in advance, or the students immediately around me, that I was taking out my phone.  If I did not, I would have to buy treats next day for the entire class.

Was the policy foolproof?  Of course not.  But I would say one-to-three students in each class each day announced they were using their cellphone, and I probably issued one-or-two warnings in each class each day.  I had to give out a brown bag in each class only about two-or-three times the entire year and, instead of it being confrontative, the whole class, including the offending student, viewed it in a very light-hearted manner.

Compared to the many other challenges we teachers face each day,  this policy turned cellphone use into a very minor level hassle.

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