Chromebooks have become a classroom staple. There is one drawback.

As back-to-school season begins in New York, the city’s teachers have organized their classrooms as usual: hanging posters, reading syllabuses, sharpening pencils, and so on. ten yearsI charge Chromebooks.

These lightweight laptops have become a staple in the post-COVID classroom, and for good reason. It allows students to learn at their own pace, access materials, and create projects and presentations without expensive items. Even some inspectors in the city requires special time For math and reading applications on computers.

As a member of Generation Z and a teacher living in Brooklyn, I worry that relying on technology for education will make learning worse. Negative effects of excessive screen time.

I got my first iPhone for my 11th birthday. It was the beginning of sixth grade, braces, and the transition to the digital world. During my pre-teen years, I never understood why my parents questioned how much time I spent on my phone. I was just texting my friends, sending memes, sharing homework answers, and talking about school crushes.

To me, this was the same as talking in person at each other’s homes without bothering to decide whose parent would take us there. However, my family viewed my phone as a way to isolate myself from the family, even if we were in the same room. The phone had become an addiction in adolescence; And not just for me.

Last research showed how screen time, especially time spent on smartphones, tunes our brains well into adolescence and adulthood. In the widely discussed book 2024 “Anxious Generation” social psychologist Jonathan Haidt details how the cultural shift from a “play-based childhood” to a “phone-based childhood” corresponds to a spike in mental illness in adolescence. Haidt quotes data It shows that since 2010 there has been a 139% increase in anxiety in people aged 18-25, and a 145% and 161% increase in depression in teenage girls and boys respectively.

Unfortunately, these numbers are not surprising. They reflect the experiences of me and my friends as we alternated antidepressants, sat in bed surveying the disaster, and resented our peers with more likes and followers. We were reminded of our pre-iPhone days, when we would explore the neighborhood and be left to our own devices (no devices!) to overcome social, emotional, and physical challenges without adult intervention—a concept Haidt describes as follows: “free play.”

The only place I was free from the pressure of taking and scrolling photos was school. I fell in love with British and US History and was embarrassingly keen to participate in class discussions and debates. These lessons were opportunities to connect.

But as Chromecarts entered about eighth or ninth grade, the connection weakened. Many STEM courses were technology-heavy, with pre-existing modules that students could pursue independently with little interaction with their peers and teachers. Remote learning at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic only made things worse.

When I started teaching middle school in Brooklyn last year, I realized that my students were experiencing this onslaught of technology long before I did. I wondered how they managed to complete third and fourth grades virtually. How did they develop basic reading, math, social, emotional, and executive functioning skills while sitting in front of a computer, tablet, or phone? How did they grow up without much-needed free play?

Fact is that many did not.

We need more Gen Z educators to be honest about their relationship with technology.

Several of my students in this age group entered secondary school with the same background knowledge they had a year and a half before they started digital learning. For example, in a U.S. history class, my seventh-grade students were taking turns reading a passage on the topic. Compromise of 1850. While reading books to different groups, I encountered confusion about the pronunciation of the words “Kansas” and “Missouri.” It didn’t look like the typical errors of skipping words or mixing up letters, it was as if they had never seen the names of these states before. The same looks appeared when I asked what nouns and verbs were and whether they should be counted in groups of seven or eight. Didn’t you learn this in third grade, I thought to myself? Then I remembered what happened when I was in third grade.

Fortunately, this group of students has made tremendous academic and social-emotional strides since returning to the physical classroom. But when they returned, they brought with them habits that reinforced the need for instant gratification.

With a Chromebook with them all day, they often answer all questions on Google, including questions asking for their thoughts and analysis. These days, it’s common to give up on memorizing your friends’ phone numbers and street addresses, and by the same token, give up on memorizing multiplication tables and basic spelling rules. Why should you memorize or learn to multiply 6 by 8 or the difference between “there” and “their”? read analog clock When can you look? And how can we expect our students to learn these basic pieces of background knowledge without giving them the opportunity to grapple with the challenges of learning?

When schoolwork and their peers get boring or frustrating, they can fill their time (or avoid difficult conversations) by browsing Pinterest, Google Images, or sneaking a peek at Snapchat. I don’t blame them; I also developed the habit of filling empty and stressful moments with aimless scrolling. But when we lose boredomwe lose space for creativity and reflection; We cannot learn to problem solve when we run away from our problems.

I’m walking a fine digital line carefully as I plan for this school year: I want to encourage independent and flexible study habits, which can be done through online assignments. But I also want to encourage interdependent thinking and discussion skills that are more difficult to achieve on screen.

I believe teaching digital literacy and screen hygiene is the most responsible approach to the topic, but to be effective, we need more Gen Z educators to be honest about their own relationship with technology. In the days of Kik and Omegle we did not know its harmful effects or addictive nature., c. 2013. We can now equip our students with the tools to avoid this teenage addiction.

Skyler Graham is an assistant teacher apprentice at the company. Ember Charter Schools. He currently teaches high school English and social studies. You can find more of his work Here.