By David
Pendery
After reading the Bloomberg article “Smartphones have no place in the classroom, ban them” published in yesterday’s paper, I could not agree more.
As a teacher in Taiwan, I have seen that phones have a firm grip on students. I have scanned my classrooms and seen virtually 95 percent of the students at a time glued to their phones for hours. They seem not to be paying the least bit of attention to me, and not a few appear to be doing little more than cruising around on social media sites, listening to music, reading external materials, playing games — exactly what we do not want in class.
I have “suggested” to schools that the best solution would be to check phones in, for the reasons noted in the Bloomberg article — that they are diminishing student academic performance and skills.
Probably I have not pushed strongly enough, but I find myself between a rock and a hard place, as cellphones might have a valuable use in class. In a word, one cannot always say that “smartphones have no place in the classroom.”
Phones are often used as dictionaries and thesauruses by students, and I cannot disagree with this. They may be used for research purposes during open book tests as well. The Bloomberg article takes a firm, unyielding position on this issue, but the uses noted here have value for students. In a word, there is more at work with this issue, and an actual ban in Taiwan might be hard to achieve.
The difficulty is ensuring that phones are used only for proper reasons, and not for non-academic uses during school hours, as the article says. I do not have an answer for how we could achieve this, and for these reasons, teachers in Taiwan find themselves on the horns of a dilemma. Although these devices could be highly problematic, we might not have the option of banning them completely.
I have not offered a solution to this problem, and I look forward to proposed solutions to this difficulty.
David Pendery is an associate professor at the National Taipei University of Business.
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