Todd Cassell, a teacher and coach at Gordon Lee High School in Chickamauga, Georgia, has seen the numbing effect mobile phones have on students.
Sometimes, if there are a few minutes left at the end of a class period, Cassell tells students they can talk among themselves or look at their phones — which are taken up at the beginning of each class to limit distractions.
They almost always choose their phones over actual conversation, he said.
Not only that, but they immediately fall under the spell of phone games, texts and social media.
“It’s dead silence in here,” he said in an interview at the school last month. “I’ll say, ‘Y’all can talk if you want to,’ and there’s dead silence. They won’t speak to each other.”
Cassell, 48, teaches a ninth grade course that combines driver’s education and a curriculum called High School Transitions, which teaches communications and study skills. Part of the course is designed to get conversation-starved teens to talk, whether it’s giving speeches or participating in debates.
This year, Cassell resurrected an idea he formerly tried several years ago while teaching math at Heritage High School in nearby Catoosa County. Back then, he offered students incentives to give up their mobile phones for a week.
This year he offered to let students at Gordon Lee skip one of the mandatory speeches in the High School Transitions class if they would give up their cellphones for one school week, from Monday morning until Friday afternoon. In a class of 17, he had nine takers, he said.
Students are generally aware of the price they pay for mobile phone dependency, he said.
“One of the things that comes up every year (in class) is the question, ‘How can I be a better student?’ What can teachers do, (what can) parents do, (what can) students do? They (students) always bring up cellphones. The kids are very aware of how many issues cellphones cause them, time-wise, relationship-wise — they know.”
At Heritage High School, Cassell offered a points bonus on students’ final grade for those who took the phone-surrender challenge.
“At the time, it was two weeks (without phones),” he said. “I didn’t have as many takers as I thought. Out of three classes, I’d probably say there were 20 (takers),” he said. “I locked (the phones) in a closet. We just put them in a box and locked them up.”
Cassell said about 80% of parents at Heritage responded positively to the experiment, but there were a few parents who pushed back because they wanted their children to have access to their phones for safety reasons.
Still, the students at Gordon Lee this year who stuck with the phone experiment almost all began to see positive results, he said.
“I asked them, ‘How did the week go?’ There were a couple who said they were bored to death. But most of them said it wasn’t bad. They’d say things like, ‘I had more time with my family.'”
Cassell, who has a daughter in ninth grade, said that on the rare occasion when he takes her mobile phone away from her, father and daughter actually begin to communicate better.
“It seems like we get along so much better after about three days,” he said. “(The students) said the same thing, (that) they were talking to their family more after a few days, (and) they weren’t in their rooms as much.”
“Life Stories” is published on Mondays. Contact Mark Kennedy at mkennedy@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6645. Follow him on Twitter @TFPcolumnist.