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By TYLER RALEY | Staff Writer

As a student growing up in an age where technology was slowly being integrated into schools and our education, it felt like times were becoming as good as ever. We as students were beginning to find many more ways to learn, had unlimited resources at our fingertips and even were getting the benefit of not having to always carry around heavy textbooks anymore.

I will admit, having a cell phone in school really did feel like a luxury because to me, everything just felt more efficient and I felt more up to date. I had applications to access and work on my class assignments, and during breaks, I had the ability to message my friends and check my social media to catch up on what my friends were doing, as well as the latest breaking news.

As time went on though, I, like many of my peers, was unknowingly becoming obsessed with all that my phone had to offer during school, and it was not until the late stages of grade school that I truly noticed it.

With every year that I had access to my cellular device during school hours, I felt more and more distracted. At the times where my teachers would let us pull our phones out to start looking at our assignments, I would do exactly that, but as I got into working, I would always find myself from time to time closing things out to check messages or other things that I had no business checking at that time. I was so enthralled with my phone that it became a major hindrance on my academic production levels.

I was a good student. I made mostly A’s in school and graduated with honors out of high school, but I felt lazy in a sense. I had not really experienced a class that was strict on not having phones in a long time.

When I got to college at Auburn, my favorite professor taught the most daunting class for any journalism major: mass media law. However, out of the three courses I took with him, we were not allowed to have phones, and honestly, that benefitted me.

Not having a phone out in my media law class, allowed me to focus intently, learn, take in the information and most importantly, notice the environment around me. When it came time to study for the exams, my friend and I had a system where we would hand our phones to each other so as to not become distracted in our studies. What were the results? I was able to make a 95 in the class, which was hard to do.

Being a kid who was born in the midst of Generation Z, you might come to the foregone conclusion that I would be severely against an effective cell phone ban in schools, but I can tell you as a student who graduated near the top of his class in both high school and college, I definitely support it.

I do see both sides of the argument. Yes, using cell phones is good for keeping parents updated on schedule changes. Yes, having cell phones provides a multitude of resources to use for school assignments, as well a chance for students to get in a productive mood by listening to music.

If we look at the other side however, if a student gets distracted on their phone during class, and it takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to get their focus back, how is a student going to get quality work done at school? Even outside of class activities, students have taken a major hit in their mental health as a result of them always looking to check social media and the so-called “perfect lives” that others live.

The topic is polarizing, I know, and there are great arguments to both sides, but even today’s adults do not take enough time to look at the world around us and learn in the process. So why not make the change now and set up today’s kids for better success in the future—get them to actually talk to others and take their eyes away from the screen.