According to freshman Emily Kate Beach, many students try to find the balance between school and their phones. 

“When you finish your homework, it would make sense to be able to use your phone. If you finish whatever the assignment is and it’s not a distraction, then you should be able to use it,” Beach said. “It’s not a big deal. It doesn’t bother the teacher if you’ve already finished the assignment.”

Junior Joey Schweppe doesn’t like when teachers take his phone, but understands that phones can become a distraction. The disruption of class from phones can lead to learning content later than scheduled, missing parts of the assignment or lecture and distracting the teacher so they can’t do their job.

“I don’t think [teachers] should be able to take our phones because they’re our property. I do kind of agree with the idea that we shouldn’t be distracted by them, but they shouldn’t really be able to take them. I have had my phone taken many times by teachers whether it was justified or not,” Schweppe said.

Junior Jack Maniaci says that when teachers take his phone, he becomes worried that he is missing important notifications.

“Sometimes it makes me really nervous when my phone is taken away because [I worry that] if a family member needed to contact me in an emergency, [they wouldn’t be able to]. In my class where my phone does get taken away, there have been times where my mother will send me an important text, which I am not able to see until the end of that class. Because of that instance, I’ve been worried or stressed during that class about what could possibly be going on without my knowledge,” Maniaci said.

Many of the students agree that COVID-19 did make this problem worse. Schweppe believes that school during virtual campus made it too easy to not pay attention in class, and so now students are used to not paying attention. Schweppe has found that if he puts his phone in Do Not Disturb mode when he has important work to do, it keeps him from being distracted as much.

“I think everybody got addicted to their phones [during quarantine]. So now, students are still always on their phones during school and it is a major problem. I find it becomes a habit to check my phone rather than due to boredom or any other reason, ” Schweppe said.

Overall, some students who are motivated to not let their phones distract them, like Beach, have found ways of making sure that their phone is not in the picture when they are working and would encourage other students to do the same.

“I had been listening to music and doing [school] work at the same time. I felt like I had been working for way longer than necessary and I realized it was because the music disrupted my train of thought. Now, I don’t listen to music while working and I have stopped checking it while I take breaks or in between assignments,” Beach said. “I noticed when I checked it in between breaks that it made me want to check it even more while I was working. I learned that the fastest way for me to get my homework done is to not use it at all while I have homework to do. I never use my phone while the teacher is talking, but my phone does distract me a lot when I am supposed to be doing work.”