2025-2026 school year, one month in

Last week a group of my 12th grade girls asked me what would push me to quit, and I said essentially, as long as everything stays exactly as it is, I will stay put.

I have been teaching senior English for 6 years now. For a long time, I thought I would have a meltdown if my grade level was ever changed, but now I have the confidence in my abilities to know that I could manage a grade change (but please, please not ninth). I wouldn’t like it, but I could do it.

What I don’t know if I could do is deal with cellphones again.

Since day 1 of this school year, students have been required to hand in their cellphone at the front door of the school. All the teachers were skeptical. It wasn’t the first school-wide phone policy we’ve had (throwback to Yondr pouches), and it didn’t go well because there were no consequences for not following the policies. But this year, students haven’t even been given the chance to break the rules. And the amazing thing is, I have barely heard kids complain. When separated from their phones, when there’s not a phone in sight, all of us are more at ease.

If the topic comes up, yes, many kids, including these girls, will say they want their phone back and they don’t think the new phone policy is positively impacting the school. But many others do acknowledge that they and their peers are more deeply engaged in class than ever before. And I appreciate greatly when they can take that wider perspective, because that’s a big challenge I see with kids, no matter how smart and studious they are—many kids believe that their individual experience must be everyone’s experience.

In the conversation with the girls about what would make me quit, I told them they wouldn’t like my answer, but I’d tell them if they really wanted to know. When I told them that cellphones might be a dealbreaker for me, as I predicted, they didn’t like it. But their reasoning was interesting to me. They said, “But Ms. Conroy, nobody goes on their phone in your class because your work is interesting. So you don’t really have a problem with phones, it’s all in your head.”

I couldn’t help but laugh. These particular 12th grade students were all kids I had taught before in different courses when they were younger, some in their 10th grade year and some in 11th. And each one of them had certainly spent some time on their phones in my class before, albeit not very much compared to a lot of other students. I chose to leave that point out of it.

What I did tell them was that their experience is nowhere near universal. I concede the point that due to teaching mostly 12th grade and cellphones being my number one rule and the hill I’ll die on every single day, if you walked into every classroom in the school in previous years, you would see the least cellphone activity in my room. Kids have always known how important it is to me to have a phone-free space, and most of them respected that as best as their brains would allow. My AP classes in particular almost never took a phone out. However, in most of my classes, there were a number of kids positively glued to their phones every day—truly as if it were hot glued to their hands. Many kids in my school do not carry bookbags or even a tote bag of some kind. I would ask, “But where do you keep your phone?” They’d reply, “In my hand, of course.” They saw no need to ever put it down.

The girls insisted for a while that the work was too interesting to ignore for a phone, but I explained that some kids never got a chance to see what the work even was, that’s how locked into their phones they were. Some kids were so addicted, they couldn’t even look up to see what was on the board. Some kids may have never had a teacher they trusted before, so it never occured to them that I might have something valuable for them, even if they could look up and consider it. By then I had convinced the girls that my experience was not, in fact, all in my head. Still, they said, “But we actually have things to learn here. Our other classes don’t actually teach us anything.”

And then finally one girl said, “Actually…our US history class did have things to learn, but I still went on my phone because I thought that teacher was boring.” She looked up at me inquisitvely and said, “I don’t know why you’re not boring.”

I shrugged and smiled, “Me neither, but thanks for that.”

I would love to know what phones are like in your schools this year, whether you’re a teacher, student, parent, or anyone connected to a school!