Relationship Blockers in the Classroom

Jonathan Haidt, author of The Anxious Generation, refers to phones and other tech in kids’ hands as “experience blockers”, and truer words haven’t been spoken. As I’ve considered how this pertains to the classroom, and what is happening as tech continues to weasel its way between educators and their students, I’ve realized that devices have also increasingly become “relationship blockers” at school.  

For most of human history, relationships have typically been able to develop organically, over time, with consistent time and nurturing. This has been true in the classroom as well, and fostering connections between students and teachers, students and administrators/staff, and of course, students and their fellow students, has always been a part of the academic experience. Yet, over the past 10-15 years, as technology has made its way into classrooms all over the world, it has become increasingly more difficult for relationships to develop, for friendships to blossom.

In the 2023-24 school year, I began teaching at a middle school with a 1:1 policy, which meant that each student was assigned their own device, typically a chromebook of some sort.

Although I kept my students away from their devices as much as possible, I did allow the use of Chromebooks one time in my classes, as an experiment of sorts, and if I’m being perfectly honest, we were approaching the end of the school year and I was exhausted.

I assigned a research project that in my previous years of teaching experience, when worked on by students in a computer lab, should have taken a couple of class periods to complete. My students last year, however, had such a difficult time focusing on the task at hand, and continued to ask/beg/demand for more time to work on their projects. What should have taken two or three class periods stretched to four or five, and their resultant slideshows demonstrated how little they had actually learned about the topics they had chosen to research.

As it came time for students to present their findings, I realized that I had truly let the cat out of the bag in allowing them to use their devices in my classroom. I finally felt it necessary to confiscate a couple of students’ Chromebooks because they simply could not resist playing games on them while their classmates were presenting. I told them they could retrieve them at the office at the end of the day, and was taken aback by the aggressive energy that ensued, emanating from a number of students in the room. They demanded justice for their classmates, as they bemoaned the inhumanity of what I had done in taking away their classmates’ devices.

After class, I was preparing to bring the Chromebooks down to the office, and was surprised when one of the school’s assistant principals showed up in my room (less than 10 minutes after class had ended), and promptly picked up the Chromebooks so that he could deliver them back into the students’ hands. He explained that they could not be without them for their next classes, and that this was school policy. I was flabbergasted at what was being taught to these students: that their Chromebooks were of paramount importance, and their apparent need for them superseded any of their misbehavior or disrespect for authority.

As I later commiserated with a couple of neighboring colleagues about this experience after school that day, I was told that using GoGuardian, a monitoring software, would have helped in this situation. While it’s possible that this may have been helpful in the moment, the underlying issue, in my opinion, is that we are trying to solve tech problems at school with more tech. The thought of me sitting at my desk, behind my screen, monitoring my students who were also on their screens, was unfathomable to me. It was completely counterintuitive to my goals as a mentor and role model in my classroom.

My previous successes as an educator over the previous decade had largely been because of my ability to form meaningful relationships with my students. These relationships took time and consistency and intentional and purposeful interactions and conversations. Tech in the classroom has increasingly blocked my efforts to connect with my students over the years, and when I began teaching at this particular school last year, it felt like there was such a barrier of tech between myself and my students, that I found it almost impossible to get over this wall, in the hopes of connecting with them. The relationships I formed with my students last year were few and far between, and it was difficult for me not to feel that I was failing them. 

The fact that we are allowing products in schools that are so inherently dangerous to students in myriad ways, that they need to be monitored by other products (not to mention the fact that these same products have made our students significantly less capable academically!), is counterintuitive. And yet somehow, most have come to accept this as “the way of the future.”  Although some of us have been gradually waking up to the absurdity of it all, many still don’t seem to be able to make out the forest for the trees. For me, the obvious solution is clear:  get tech the heck out of classrooms, so that teachers and students can focus on real, in-person connection and learning again.