Coach Nick vs The Distraction Rectangles

School has simply given up on getting laptops and phones out of the classroom. How do you run an academic extracurricular program under those circumstances?

I graduated from high school in 1998. By the time I graduated, most of my friends had email addresses. A couple of friends had carphones, but no one owned a fully portable cellphone yet. In college, laptops in class were rare.

Before I set foot in The Middle School, all I knew about School Day Screen Time was what I had read in the news. Some schools enforce no-phones or even no-screens rules. My hunch, though, is that most allow laptops in class with, shall we say, less-than-perfect enforcement that devices be used for school work during school hours.

During class time, the official policy at The Middle School is that laptops are for schoolwork. If you’re done with your classwork, you can goof off a bit by playing chess or Blooket or fiddling around with an online graphing calculator. It’s not my first-choice policy, but it’s probably fine.

Of course, Math Club meets after school. I’m also not a teacher, which has its benefits and costs. Being not-a-teacher who is trying to keep the tweens off their laptops and phones during not-school is like pulling teeth. I’ve tried asking nicely, which sometimes works. I’ve tried my shouty-teacher voice, which doesn’t really work. I’ve tried what school professionals call “reward structures” but I call “bribery schemes”, which work, but at what cost. Since this is extra math, I don’t really want to be The Bad Guy. But I’m also there to etch grooves into their brain. It’s hard to do that when they’re staring at something else.

At one point, I resolved to have a swift-certain-fair zero tolerance policy next school year. Then I went back to the weirdo private school where I went to high school. I felt pretty certain they’d have a no-phones, laptops-for-work-only policy. They don’t! At least at the high school level. Part of the issue here is the logistical challenge of enforcement in high school — if the start and end of every class is putting your screens on the teachers desks, over the course of the day you probably lose at least half an hour of instructional time. If the phone/laptop usage is minor, is that really worth it? Are you going to send notes to the parents and schedule conferences about this? Will the parents have your back, or blow you off? Tough choices.

Last week I was speaking with the Math Team coach at one of the suburban schools. It’s a “school of choice” that requires an application and lottery, and it’s in a high-income, high-education suburb (not the highest in the Seattle area, but way up there). This is their first year with a math team, and according to the coach, her mathletes students are very self-motivated. They organize their own practices, push each other to do better, and post on Discord about math problems at 3am. These are engaged students, and yet her Math Team students goof off on their laptops during class too. Outside of a handful of no-excuses schools, it seems that everyone has given up here.

This leaves me at a loss about what to do about screens. I’m hoping to use a combination of rewards (a “House Points” system similar to the Good Behavior Game, what you see in Harry Potter, or what you may have experienced at a summer camp) and holding every-six-weeks “Distraction Rectangle Weeks” where the kids get to show me math-related stuff on their phones and laptops. I’m cautiously optimistic.

But if plan A falls apart, what’s plan B? Should I shrug my shoulders and accept that only a few kids will learn much of anything, while the rest spend an hour buried in Blooket? Move to zero tolerance? Quit being a math coach? I’m going to need an answer, but I don’t have one yet.