Opinion Essay Example (With Breakdown)

I taught a literature section for three semesters while I was in graduate school, and for the first two I had a standard laptops-and-phones-welcome policy because I did not want to be the uptight professor who treats adults like children. By the end of the second semester, I was convinced that the policy was hurting the students I most wanted to help, and for the third semester I banned phones entirely and required laptops to be closed during discussion. I do not regret the switch. I think phones should be out of classrooms, including college classrooms, and the arguments for allowing them sound more principled than they turn out to be in practice. The argument for allowing phones usually goes: these are adults, they can decide how to spend their attention, and restrictions are infantilizing. I used to believe this. I stopped believing it when I noticed, around week nine of my second semester, that the students who were looking at their phones during discussion were almost never the students who had signed up for the class because they loved literature. They were the students who had signed up because it fit their schedule, and they were using the phone to distract themselves from a class they were already half-checked-out of. The principled-sounding argument about adult autonomy was, in practice, serving the students who were least invested — and those were exactly the students for whom a demanding class was most likely to produce a breakthrough. The second thing I noticed was subtler and harder to argue in principle. Discussion in a literature class depends on the possibility that any individual comment could take the conversation somewhere unexpected. That possibility requires everyone to be paying attention — not because every comment is going to be brilliant, but because the unpredictability is what makes the room feel alive. Three or four phones glowing in the corners of my field of view killed the room's unpredictability. Not because those students were disrupting — they were quiet — but because the feeling of shared attention is fragile and visible inattention broke it. The students who were engaged noticed, even if they did not say so, and discussion got flatter. I know the pushback. Banning phones is paternalistic. It does not teach self-regulation. It treats adults like children. I have heard all of it. My honest answer is that the classroom is forty-five minutes long and self-regulation can be learned elsewhere — in the other twenty-three hours of the day, at work, on the train, in line for coffee. Those forty-five minutes are not a representative sample of adult life; they are a specific structured environment that depends on specific conditions to work. Asking students to put phones away for forty-five minutes is not asking them to become a different kind of person. It is asking them to treat this particular room as what it actually is: a place where a thing depends on attention. I do not think I am going to convince anyone whose mind is already made up. I do not even think this is the most important issue in higher education — nothing in this essay matters if the students are not getting taught by people who know what they are doing in the first place. But on the narrow question of whether phones belong in the room, my answer after three semesters is clearly no, and the reason is not the principled one about attention economics. It is the specific one about what happened when I actually tried both policies and compared the discussions.