From frantically asking your friends about homework at the last minute, to staying up to date with your work, to club reminders, to Kahoot our cell phones tend to be like a second life source for most high school students. Therefore it may seem strange when a classmate says they don’t have a cell phone, since the majority does have one. According to Boston Globe, about 88 percent of American teens ages 13 to 17 have a mobile phone, most of them being smart phones.
However, some students at Steinbrenner manage just fine without a phone.
Studies from The Daily Mail show that the average person will check their phone around 110 times a day- about once every 10 minutes of the time that they are awake. They also suggest that students without cell phones are more attentive during class. Sophomore Lindsay Bauman says that she is grounded most of the time, so she is familiar with life without a phone.
“It’s a struggle sometimes, when I need to research something or that I can’t listen to music with the rest of the class,” said Bauman.
She does admit however that she pays more attention in class without it. But, there are downsides.
“Most of the time I don’t finish my work at school so I have to take it home. It’s hard in some cases after school because I don’t have access to anybody to ask them questions about what the homework is or how to do it,” said Bauman.
Being able to contact your classmates is a major luxury, but it does cause stress to students without it.
“Communication is a problem without a cellphone. In classes with group work, where decisions are made over group chats, it’s tough. It requires more planning, and we have to be sure of what we are all doing in order to avoid a communication error,” said sophomore Jacob Allen.
Social media is a rather large aspect of a lot of students lives, which can cause people without it to feel out of the loop with a lot of trends as well as keeping up with their friends. However, some students who do have a cell phone, and choose not to use social media say that it stresses them out or that they would rather not be plugged in all the time.
English teacher Tiffany Southwell has her students do a project every year where they volunteer to give up their cell phone for 24 hours, and then write a reflection on the experience.
“At the beginning of the project, most of them are terrified since they are so used to always having their phones on them. However, afterwards they all tend to have similar reactions. What most of them will say is that at first, they realized how nervous they were without it and that they would keep checking their pockets all the time. But then, they would realize how often it was that they were checking it when it wouldn’t even make a sound. They say how crazy that is, and afterwards how relaxed they felt,” said Southwell.
The students that do the experiment often say that they shouldn’t use their cellphones as much as they do, and that they should have certain hours where they turn them off. However, they also say that they probably wouldn’t do that unless someone encourages them to do it.
“Students tend to say that they get more sleep, feel relaxed and feel relieved after giving their phones up. Also a lot of students say after the project that they paid more attention in class. They just can get so much more out a class without a cellphone, since they aren’t constantly checking their messages,” said Southwell.
Obviously, there are disadvantages to being a student without a cellphone, like the lack of ability to communicate with your classmates outside of school or certain inconveniences in class and the inability to have instant access to information. However, there are certain advantages that may make you think about turning your phone off every once in a while.
Grace Becker// Staff Writer
