I’m volunteering a couple mornings a week at a local high school, helping out with computer science classes.
The way the classes are taught, via an online curriculum, provides a great temptation to kids to get off-task, which they do, usually by entertaining themselves with their phones.
They get off-task in other ways too — web surfing, doing homework for other classes — but the main distractor is the phones . . .
“As I mentioned before, I worked with another CS class a couple years ago. No phones allowed in the classroom.
“I remember one day the assistant principal was in class observing . . . a student had a phone out, looking at it . . . he was holding it under the table so no one could see it, but this guy, the assistant principal, he did see it.
“Oh man, did he hit the roof! If a student had pulled out a gun, there couldn’t have been any more excitement in the room.
“I thought that was overkill at the time. But I have to tell you that those kids kicked ass on the AP exam. Can I say that? That was the CS A test. Hard test.
“Most of the students got a 5. Most of the students who didn’t get a 5 got a 4. Nobody got a 3, one student got a 2 and, out of about 35 students, 6 of them got a 1, including the guy who spent 47 hours playing video games instead of studying. What did you expect, right?
“Now you guys may crush it on the AP test too. We don’t know yet.
“A lot of programmers have a phone in view when they’re working . . . a lot of programmers listen to music, sometimes through their phone . . . but nobody has the phone in their hand looking at it every minute, you’d never get anything done.
“So it depends what your goals are. If your goal is to get a top score on an AP exam, I don’t think you’re helping yourself with the phones.”