KoreaToday Cell phone — enemy No. 1 in classrooms
Teachers, students in conflict over mobile phone use at school
By Kim Rahn
A Seoul middle school teacher Park, 33, recently caught a student staring down at his desk with his head lowered during class. As she approached, Park discovered that he was not looking at the subject material but reading an online novel using his cell phone through a hole which he made in the wooden desk.
It’s not new to Park. She and her fellow teachers are aware many students use cell phones during class secretly — reading online novels, watching movies, sending text messages, and even playing games, especially after smartphones became popular and more available.
When detecting cell phone use during class, Park confiscates the phones for several days, with five to six phones seized per week on average.
“When I tell the students to hand the phones over to me, they claim they only used the English dictionary function. Some say the phones are their friends’. They later come to my office, crying and begging to give ‘their precious’ phone back,” Park said. “You know these days kids can’t live without a phone.”
Caught using cell phones during class, some students give teachers cell phones which they previously used and are now out of operation, while continuing to use their “real” phones.
As shown in Park’s case, the battle is fierce between students and teachers over the use of the electronic device, a headache that has been bothering the education field for years.
Main distractions
Bae Gun-souk, who is to be a senior at Chungdam High School in southern Seoul, said he can see many of his classmates sending text messages or using other functions on their cell phones under the desks during class.
“Despite repeated warnings from teachers, some of my classmates are busy playing with their cell phones. It seems they cannot help it,” Bae said. “But cell phone use is a major distraction, keeping us from concentrating in class. Even from the viewpoint of a student myself, using cell phones during class is not right,” he said.
Lee So-youn, a second grader at a middle school in Yeosu, South Jeolla Province, said the wider use of smartphones has “helped” students use the phones more secretly. “If you want to send a text message with a feature phone, you have to press the buttons hard, sometimes making clicking noise. But with a smartphone, you can use the phone by just touching without making any noise. It has made it more difficult for teachers to detect cell phone use,” she said.
A 50-year-old teacher at a high school in eastern Seoul, Baek, laments the lack of disciplinary tools to block the use of cell phones, especially after corporal punishment was banned.
Even temporary confiscation does not work, he said.
“My school gives black marks to students caught using cell phones in class. But it doesn’t deal a serious blow to students and they keep using their phones anyway. So teachers seize the phones for a week or so,” he said. “But in the case of taking away the device, parents sometimes call teachers and ask them to return the phones, saying they need to contact their children when the students go to hagwon late in the evening or elsewhere,” Baek said.
Some local authorities, such as the Seoul Metropolitan Council and Ulsan Metropolitan Office of Education, tried to make an ordinance to ban students from bringing their cell phones to schools.
But they couldn’t push the plan through, as a series of surveys showed a negative response toward the plan and some parents’ groups cited an infringement of students’ human rights.
Each school currently has its own rules about cell phone use. According to a survey conducted by the Korean Federation of Teachers’ Associations (KFTA) on 450 teachers last March, 46 percent of schools allowed students to carry the phones but banned using them during class; 36.7 percent of schools took possession of the phones when students came to school and returned them when they went home; 10.4 percent didn’t allow children to bring the phones to school at all; and 6.9 percent didn’t enforce any regulations.
Lack of effective restrictions
The weight is shifting toward permitting cell phone use following the National Human Rights Commission’s recent decision that banning cell phone use at non-class times, such as lunch time or recess between classes, is an infringement of human rights.
The commission said such “excessive restrictions” on cell phone use infringes on the freedom of action, freedom of privacy and freedom of communication.
The Korean Teachers and Education Workers’ Union said it consents with the commission’s decision. “With the decision, we hope schools will scrap coercive measures in regulating cell phone use,” Dong Hoon-chan, a director of the union, said.
Despite the commission’s decision, however, teachers still say cell phone use during recess or lunch time affects the classes following. “They cannot control themselves — if a student reads an online novel during recess and stops reading when the next class begins, he or she gets anxious to know how the story goes. The student ultimately tries to secretly continue reading the story,” said the middle school teacher Park.
She said male students even watch porn clips in the classroom on their mobile phones, adding that some more effective restrictions are necessary to keep cell phones from disrupting classes.
Teachers express concerns that the increasing use of smartphones by students will further worsen already serious problems as they easily steal attention away from teachers.
KFTA spokesman Kim Dong-seok also said that in its survey, 65 percent of teachers said their class has been disrupted by students’ cell phone use. “The commission needs to consider not only the infringement of students’ freedom of communication but also the infringement of teachers’ rights to teach,” he said.
Park said she doesn’t think it’s possible to completely ban students from bringing cell phones to schools. “But using phones result in many negative aspects, such as addiction, individualism, failing to concentrate and craving new models. Not only teachers but also parents should control children’s cell phone use.”
Dong of the teachers’ union also said students, parents and teachers should come up with guidelines for proper use of cell phones at schools through mutual agreement. “We know that it will be difficult. But teachers need to teach students to exhibit more self-control,” he said.