Australia has passed legislation that forbids children under the age of sixteen from having social media accounts. To be clear, this is not a cellphone ban so far as I currently understand it, but rather something targeted at kids’ ability to sign up for social media accounts in the first place. I guess the feeling is that, once you take the social media out of the phone, the device just becomes this inert piece of irrelevant technology.
Yeah, right.
In the Australian situation, being monitored breathlessly by provincial governments here in Canada who like to make big noises that have little impact, the gatekeepers, the people responsible for ensuring compliance with the age requirements, are the creators and operators of the social media companies that are being shut out of one of their most lucrative markets. There’s those damned foxes again, in charge of the gate to the hen house, so to speak.
A perfect solution. And we’re going to study it carefully.
We should study it carefully because our own attempts to combat the influence of cellphone distraction in class have been happening for years, and have been defeated for years, primarily for two key reasons. First, anyone who underestimates the Machiavellian resiliency and tech-savvy of a fourteen year-old truly doesn’t have any idea about the nature of their audience. You might need to spend some time outside of the staffroom to gain a better understanding of your charges, but I suppose giving up the social bonhomie offered there for your 15-minute break, which is really 25 minutes once you show up late for class, would be far too much for anyone to ask or expect.
Second, the Australian legislation, just like the current Ontario legislation, has no guts. There is no gate to keep. There are no gatekeepers to watch over it. That’s because it’s the same drivel over and over again, sort of like that betting game where you guess which shell the pea is under.
In Ontario, the government makes a big show of finally doing something that will make a difference, makes announcements that media report upon, because a lot of media is lazy and self-serving — read Renfrew — and will gush all over it. But in the end, the implementation of whatever plan is arrived at is, when the dust is cleared, left to the same people who are racing back late to class with their arms locked in that coffee-cup-while-walking hold position which may lead to some form of teacher-specific carpal-tunnel syndrome later in life. It’s an art, by the way, that only teachers know. Walking with a coffee through crowded corridors. I tried it once, and actually had a mild slip on the stairs. Didn’t lose a drop.
Teacher discretion. A loophole the size of the Rogers Centre. And we’re going to seriously attempt to keep kids from being distracted?
So, basically, after all the sound and fury, it signifies nothing, if I can quote Billy Shakespeare, who knew what he was talking about several hundred years ago, and seemingly far more so than politicians, senior school board administrators, and their top dogs in the schools themselves. Or, if you will, the people on the ground charged with not making this work, because it can’t work, and anyone who spent any time looking at this issue would know that. Because if you leave it ultimately up to teachers, that’s the same thing as having thirty-two different cellphone policies in a single small high school in Ontario.
And we think we’re going to go up against the fourteen year-olds with this? My God, put your coffee down and look up from your Instagram. We don’t have a chance if we leave something as important as this in the hands of individual teachers. We simply don’t have a chance.
Using the simplest logic that I can muster up on short notice, for a ban to be a ban, it needs to be a ban. Not a ban with a glaring hole in it as an exception. By the way, I’m not necessarily advocating here for a ban, I’m just saying if banning something is your goal, then ban it. Don’t pretend to.
I’ve seen teacher-discretion at work and I’ve seen absolute classroom bans, both from teachers who have some inkling of how to police their spaces and from teachers who just think that banning cellphones in their classes actually has any meaning. No matter which of those teaching styles is in play, you can rest assured that, out of a class of thirty, there are thirty cellphones within easy reach, and if that number is less than thirty, it simply means that there are kids in the class who can’t afford cellphones. The Hawkeye teacher can probably suppress maybe 50% of these phones from being used, which is 50% of attention taken away from whatever lesson is in front of the class. The other teacher, the one who assumes that the students comply just simply because they were told to, suppresses maybe 0% of the cellphone usage, but doesn’t reap any rewards on the other side of the attention coin, since nobody’s paying attention to him/her/other anyway, because they’re all on their phones.
Hawkeye’s a wily veteran, and he/she/other knows that stuff’s happening that shouldn’t be happening, and when the opportunity presents, pounces. That’s when 29 students get to witness a power struggle between Hawkeye and the offending student, something way better than the drudgery of English class. In a one-sided fight with no prospect of victory and a potentially hostile crowd supporting their classmate, Hawkeye sends the kid to the office, just like the prinicipal and vice-principal told them to do at the last staff meeting if the shit were to hit the fan. Off the kid goes, and ten minutes later back the kid comes. That’s because tough-guy/girl/other in the office isn’t as tough as they sounded at that staff meeting. They’re not gonna fight with the kid, cause they don’t want the parents storming in and chewing off part of their asses, creating a scene, and phoning head office. Nope, send the kid back to English. And there’s your cellphone ban in a nutshell.
I remember one guy in another class got his phone “confiscated” by the teacher. He didn’t like that one bit. He was sent to the office. He went, but rather than telling them why he was there — because communication in schools is a joke — he asked instead to use the phone. Whereby he phoned the police to report that his phone had been “stolen” by his teacher. And they actually showed up to investigate. But making fun of police is for another article.
Then there are the teachers who figure it all out, and can’t wait to share their creative brilliance with all others at staff meetings and PD days. In sessions that are charitably described as “best practice” affairs, you encounter the teacher that has come up with the most marvellous solution ever thought of: the hanging shoe organizer. For $17 you can snag one of these babies from Amazon and drape it over a classroom door. It has maybe thirty slots, and the idea is that every student simply puts their phone in one of the slots during class time to be retrieved at the end of class proper. It’s just such a cool solution, and the other teachers nod and marvel, gasping at the sheer, well, elegance of the solution. It’s a great idea, until some freakin’ kid doesn’t put their phone into the slot. Or lies about not having a phone at all. Or, gasp, puts a dummy phone in the slot and keeps the real one on their person.
Teachers have no idea what they’re up against and are often defenceless against the level of cunning being employed against them. And the notion that a kid would lie to them? If you’re a high school teacher and you don’t think you’re being lied to throughout your work day, then you’re not paying attention or you’re naive as, well, never mind.
All day long you have to listen to how Mr. X, the cool teacher, does it this way, and Ms. Y, the pretty teacher, does it that way, and wouldn’t you like to be as cool or as pretty as X or Y, you implied loser? You’d be surprised at how powerful that argument is in our schools with so-called bans or so-called restrictions on cellphones.
Enough with the teacher-bashing. They are people like the rest of us, and they’ve been put, once again, into an almost impossible situation. Put there by a government that looks to sound tough, and a school board that also likes to sound tough, but a loving tough, mind you. But it will all come down Mr. Z, packed with his own human frailties, perhaps a little unsure of himself, in class and generally speaking, who has to face thirty fourteen year-olds who are just waiting to pounce on him for any mistake, any crack, any inconsistency that he may show. This is your cellphone policy when the big boys and girls like to talk tough, yet leave the dirty work to others who are supposed to be teachers, not conflict-management specialists. And if you are a teacher with some degree of confidence, and you do implement what you feel are reasonable approaches at conflict management and resolution, watch how quickly you get in shit for stepping outside your lane when the office phone lines light up like a goddamned Christmas tree with parents freaking out cause you caused some life-long trauma to their impressionable child for busting them waving their phone around and trashing some other kid on social media. Solving problems with kids in a school will often lead to parental intervention, and if the first line of defence is the principal’s or vice-principal’s office, then you’re all screwed.
I think that was some more teacher-bashing. Let me self-correct and re-label that as admin-bashing, which, by the way, is infinitely more fun. Again, a different book.
Back to Australia.
Groddy for the Aussies for having the pluck to go after the social media companies. And then leaving enforcement in the hands of the social media companies. They’ll do the right thing for the common good of Aussie children, you can just count on it. Which means Australian politicians are cut from the same cloth as Ontario politicians, or politicians anywhere really. And you can bet the family farm that our politicians are watching closely to see how they can emulate this folly in their own jurisdictions, and thump their chests as if they’re actually doing something.
To close, I have to make an important point. That is, how will legislation impact kids that suffer from disabilities, whether those handicaps be physical, spiritual, emotional, or societal? How many disabled children, just like their adult counterparts, rely on social media to actually have or foster friendships? To foster community? What impact will this have on their lives? Could it further isolate them? Could it make an already difficult life situation even more challenging for them?
There is no simple solution to this. I understand the need to limit distraction, because it’s an established fact and there is a direct connection between that distraction and learning. And it’s not just social media, it’s also, of course, the phones themselves. How can you ban one without the other? Does anyone think kids don’t do a serious amount of gaming on their phones? Just look a the adults around you. Will Australian kids refrain from gaming on their own, do you think? Will ours?
This is a lot of criticism from a guy who doesn’t have that panacea, that perfect solution, in his back pocket. So I acknowledge the unfairness in that. I set out to point out the inconsistencies and weaknesses in the solutions offered thus far, and if I’m to retain even a modicum of credibility, I should salute and thank those who have offered good-faith solutions. Because, hey, at least they’re trying, and I shouldn’t come across as ridiculing that.
But the solution to this is a human solution, a people solution, and those are the hardest kind of solutions, mostly because they involve people, and humans. In this case teachers and students. And just as significantly parents. How you come up with a solution that isn’t weakened by some aspect of any of those groups, or all of those groups, will be truly a marvel.
Having a good-faith solution is impossible to achieve if one of the parties involved is not acting in good-faith. And making a mockery of the party who is.
It’s almost an unfair fight. A bunch of adult politicians versus thirty fourteen year-olds.
I know where my money’s going.
NEWSMAGRENFREW 