The penultimate week of classes for a high school biology instructor in Arizona was spent getting frustrated with his students’ incessant use of smartphones in the classroom.
Mitchell Rutherford of Sahuaro High School told a local Tucson NBC affiliate early last week that he has given up trying to help his students overcome their “addiction” to their phones after trying everything.
“I have been struggling with mental health this year mostly because of what I identified as basically phone addiction with the students,” Rutherford stated to the media.
After 11 years in the field, the 35-year-old public school teacher’s last day was this past Thursday. To help his students comprehend the negative effects of using a cell phone constantly in their daily lives, Rutherford said he has used a range of lesson ideas over the past few years.
“Here’s extra credit, let’s check your screen time, let’s create habits, let’s do a unit on sleep and why sleep is important and how to reduce your phone usage for a bedtime routine, and we talked about it every day and created a basket called ‘phone jail,’” he stated, providing instances of everything he had attempted to put into effect.
Rutherford asserted that excessive phone use is worse than substance or sugar addiction, drawing comparisons between it and drug addiction.
“Opioids, obviously a huge problem, cocaine, heroin, all of those drugs, alcohol, it’s all a big problem, but like sugar even greater than that and then phones even greater than that,” he stated.
In a different interview, the teacher told the Wall Street Journal that “something shifted” in the children and that she saw this issue worsen during the COVID-19 outbreak.
Recent research indicates that pandemic learning loss has negatively impacted K–12 kids’ education, skill level, and production across the country.
Rutherford told the newspaper, “I was beginning to think I was the problem,” as he watched the issue worsen. Some children, he said, would come right out and tell him they didn’t care about school.
Still, he doesn’t entirely place the burden on the youngsters. He told the local publication that children need to be instilled with better habits by society.
“As a society, we need to prioritize educating our youth and protecting our youth and allowing their brains and social skills and happiness to develop naturally, without their phone,” Rutherford stated.
The educator informed WSJ that he is prepared to start a new professional route, such as working at a virtual college prep school or enrolling in a vocational school. Nevertheless, he fears that by making this choice, he may be “abandoning” his students.
He remarked, “I tell kids to do hard things all the time, and now I’m leaving? Part of me feels like I’m abandoning these kids.” However, I’ve decided to attempt something different that doesn’t totally consume and exhaust me.”
