During class a phone pockets sits empty. Photo Courtesy of freshman Mallory Cushing.
Phone pockets have a large role in the daily life of San Luis Obispo High School staff and students, but are the phone pockets actually doing what they’re supposed to?
The rule of putting your phone into a phone pocket at the beginning of class first began with a few teachers two years ago and spread to all of the teachers last year. The hope was that this would prevent students from using their phone and earbuds during class, but it isn’t working as well as we expected.
“Our students and teachers are expected to follow our school procedures. Students should not be on their phones during class time. The phone pockets are a great way to help ensure that our students are not distracted by their phones during class time,” said Principal Rollin Dickinson.
Even though teachers are expected to follow the rule some teachers still don’t enforce the phone pocket as long as the tech is away in class and no one is using it. Of course this is a trust approach. If you are using tech during class, students then lose the teachers trust. This means students will have to go back to putting your phone in the pocket.
“The phone pockets work well in ceramics. They eliminate some distraction and encourage students to work on their projects longer. With phones being away the whole period I have also noticed that it encourages more social interaction among students at their tables,” said ceramics teacher Tawnee Houle.
Even the teachers who do use the pockets, and enforce the rules still have creative kids working around them. These work around include trap phones, upside down phone cases, and even fibbing about having a phone.
A trap phone is when the students buy a phone that looks alike or brings in an old phone to replace their actual phone’s position in the phone pocket. The upside down phone cases is when a student takes the cases off their phone and puts it in the pocket upside down to look like a phone upside down, when in reality it isn’t. Lastly, fibbing about not having a phone, students will tell their teachers they don’t have a phone just so they don’t have to put the phone in their pocket.
“[It would be better] if we had a better technique of having no phones then that would be better than the phone pockets, because a lot of people don’t use them, so there’s no point in them being in the classes,” said freshman Aleena Manzano.
Even if teachers lock down on the rules it will still be hard for them to actually work. Putting a phone in the pocket is the students making the decision to take a break from their phone, yet in this day and age that decision is getting harder and harder to make.
