Screen Addiction: A Teacher’s Perspective

Caveat: Given the length of this post, it’s quickly become apparent that this is as much about my own personal teaching philosophy as it is about screen addiction. Whether you agree or disagree, remember that every teacher, student, classroom, school, and community is different. I’ve worked at various schools with differing policies on technology use. They each have their merits.

Let’s talk about phone/screen addiction. First of all, this is just my opinion and I’m just one man. I’m not a technophobe, but I grew up in an era when cell phones were the size and weight of bricks, internet modems made annoying noises, and we still had to rewind VHS tapes before returning them to the rental store (if you remember what those are). In short, I’m just a product of my generation. To be clear, I have no overt problem with social media, video games, or technology in general. I find technology to be fascinating and tremendously useful…when used with discipline.

I do believe that there is such as thing as phone/screen addiction. It’s more or less the big, bad, boogeyman of recent years. Parents are worried about the content their kids are accessing and teachers are worried that their students are spending more time in front of their screens than doing any actual learning. The moral watchdogs of society were saying the same thing about TV decades ago. The difference is that you didn’t carry your TV to school with you. Now we can get entertainment virtually anywhere with our magical pocket computers!