I spent a lot of time debating how I wanted to tell this story. I went back and forth trying to decide if an article or a video would be more effective, and I dabbled in a little bit of both, drafting and even helping a little bit with classmates producing a video project before it eventually got pushed aside. 

However, this story has become increasingly more important as more time passes. I’ve conducted ample amounts of research, as well as interviews with teachers and administrators, to both learn where our school district stands, and where I stand, on the newfound prevalence of artificial intelligence and the use of cell phones in public education. 

I also recently read The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt, which is an exploration of both the impacts of social media on teenagers and the growing mental health crisis present in Gen Z, which Haidt believes to be a result of technology. I will be pulling some statistics from that book, as well as information I learned through research and interviews. 

Our school district has tried implementing policies to limit phone use in classrooms multiple times, but all of them have been abandoned. At the beginning of the 2023-2024 school year, it was a school-wide policy for students to put their phones in a specific ‘phone caddy’ at the start of each class period. However, teacher enforcement of this rule varied across subjects and classrooms, and students quickly found ways around the policy, such as saying they didn’t have their phone with them, or in extreme cases, bringing a second phone to put in the caddy instead. 

The district is concerned with the amount of phone use during the school day, as it is both a distraction to the learning environment and a possible contributor to the increasing rates of anxiety and depression among teenagers. In fact, Haidt found that since 2010, the rates of major depression amongst girls have risen by approximately 145%, and for boys, around 165%. 

Though the presence of cell phones presents a challenge for student learning, the existence of relatively new artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots has created many more questions as to what is ethical or unethical for technology use in schools. ChatGPT, for example, has raised concerns about student work. The chatbot was released by OpenAI in 2022, and since then, students have gained access to a whole new resource for generating brainstorming ideas and even full essays.

In an interview with Mrs. Finter, our Assistant Superintendent of Instruction, she brought up that we’ve always had things like Grammarly or “spell check”, which are essentially artificial intelligence-based, built into the background of our computers for us to use. However, what’s different about this is that “You can really ask open-ended questions and get a uniquely generated response to whatever level of detail you need.”. 

I will admit that I have used ChatGPT for help on math assignments, and I know plenty of students who have openly stated that they’ve used it on things like bigger English assignments, creating paragraphs of work that is entirely done by AI. Not only that, but with the growing technological advances, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to be able to recognize what is AI and what is real. 

In the past, papers written in English classes had the opportunity to be put through sites like Turnitin.com to check for authenticity and plagiarism. These detectors, however, rely on artificial intelligence. That being said, how successfully can a plagiarism detector, using AI, find and identify ‘uniquely generated’ work from another version of AI like ChatGPT? 

Mr. Lowe, a veteran English teacher, commented similarly on the concern. “Plagiarism used to be very easy to catch because Turnitin.com was instrumental and really useful in scouring the internet and making matches. But now AI is scouring the internet and creating “new material”; it’s a game changer for sure”. 

Not only is it hard to recognize AI, but it is becoming difficult for teachers to create assignments, knowing that students can just generate answers without really having to put the work in. Mr. Lowe also mentioned that he “…learned to almost restructure assignments so even if you’re using AI, you still have to do the basics.”. This speaks to a need for reconstruction of teaching to address this new source of technology that is all too easy to access. 

In addition to these potential conflicts with AI, there are, of course, ethical concerns regarding how, and even if, AI should be used in the classroom. Where is the line of what is or isn’t okay? How do we teach students how to use AI as a tool for learning, and not a way of cheating or skirting around assignments? 

 To look into how the school district was handling technology, I went to Mr. Davidson, who is our constructional technology teacher on special assignment. The district seems very optimistic about new technology and the opportunity it presents, as the administration spends time trying to understand and teach the staff how to be able to access and recognize some of the tools that students are more familiar with. “We have a community of teachers and administrators who are trying to build up policy on this.”. Though because the topic is so new and upcoming, it’s hard to make final decisions on something that’s constantly changing. 

Moving away from AI for a bit, it’s just as important to look into how our access to cell phones and the internet can impact our school experience. The constant availability of phones during the school day can provide more distractions than we know what to do with. As I mentioned in the beginning, The Anxious Generation is the story of these impacts, not necessarily in schools, but of social media in general. There are some statistics that stood out to me: 

• In 2015, teens overall reported an average daily screen time of seven leisure hours on social media alone.
• Though the company says users must be 13 or older, approximately 40% of American children under 13 have Instagram accounts.
• There has been an around 135% increase in anxiety among college students since 2010, around the same time as the release of smartphones and widespread social media access. 

Essentially, with the rise of social media and phone technology, we’ve also seen extraordinary rises in the number of teenagers with anxiety, depression, and even ADHD, which can also be detrimental to classroom environments. 

Another staggering statistic that Haidt notes is that “The average teen, who now gets only seven hours of sleep per night, gets about 11 notifications per waking hour, or one every five minutes.”. If students are constantly pinged by notifications during the school day, they cannot focus, and it will take away from the learning experience. 

Recently, Governor Hochul presented the prospect of a cell phone ban, as well as any other device that is not school-issued, in public high schools. This would mean less access to social media, the internet, and even online communication throughout the school day, ideally leading to more focus in individual classes and more face-to-face communication. 

This new technology is constantly changing and developing so quickly that it can be hard to keep up with. However, it is important to understand how it fits into our lives so that we can learn to adapt to it. These developments will never go away, they will only continue to grow, so it’s important to keep an open mind and consider every angle of prospective use and value of this technology.