Curios of the week #42

Clippings, endnotes and other ephemera

Image via AI

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The senior staff at our place finished up on Friday 15 December so, bar the odd email and item of bureaucracy, I have been off work this last week. We have had friends come to visit, smoked meat, made curry and generally prepared for a busy Christmas.

My house neighbours one of my school’s campuses where significant building work is going on. Our dog, Alfie, is not convinced by builders, so it’s a good thing that with their high vis, shouting and house music, they have also now packed up for the break.

As people wind down for the holiday, the week in education has been quieter compared with recent weeks. Nevertheless, this week’s Curios include smartphones, pendulums, The Blob, The McBlob and much more.

Phone bans of the week

Anyone who thinks children should be on their smartphones in class is a dinosaur of the kind that roamed the Earth unrivalled circa 2010 but that should now be well extinct. Most of us accept smartphones are a distraction, a view largely confirmed by recent evidence from PISA showing that a schoolwide ban on smartphones significantly reduces the level of distractedness in mathematics classrooms.

However, there is a strange reluctance on the part of some adults to be the adults and ban phones from schools. For years, the government of the Australian state of Queensland demurred from bringing in a ban, finally conceding one will be in place from the start of 2024. Scotland’s education minister has merely offered support to any school principal who wants to institute a ban, leaving principals exposed to any potential heat from parents.

However, more systems are belatedly beginning to show leadership on the issue. Finland’s new government is looking at legislation to allow a ban, something that is currently ruled out by regulation, and The Netherlands, like Queensland, is introducing a ban from January.

At Clarendon, we introduced a ban at the start of 2019 and before many other schools and systems. It therefore led to an idiosyncratic approach compared to what similar schools are now doing. Phones must be in lockers from 8.30am to 3.30pm. During recess and lunch, students are allowed to use them to phone their parents — but not for any other reason — and they have to stand in front of their lockers to do so. It seems to work for us.

And it has been transformational. Less distraction in class is just the obvious bonus. We also now have students who play downball or talk to each other when on a break.

Those shrinking numbers of people who think digital devices like smartphones in the classroom are a learning opportunity miss a key point. Smartphones are designed to be attention suckers but are completely agnostic about content. They don’t have to grab a students’ attention while also teaching algebra. They just have to grab their attention. Teachers simply cannot compete with that.

Pendulum swing of the week

Education is particularly prone to pendulum swings in which an initially good idea is taken to an extreme, the extreme is laden with negative consequences and then the whole idea, even the good part of it, is abandoned until, inevitably, the pendulum swings back again.