Most students attending RMHS have at least one teacher that takes their phones. This must feel like an extremely daunting task for teachers, as smartphones are practically glued to our hands for a majority of our days.
Mr. d’Entremont teaches a class called “World War II.” It is well-known for being one of the best elective classes that students can choose to take in their senior year of school here. I have taken both variations of the class (Pacific Theatre and European Theatre), and have never been so engaged and interested in a topic in school before. I retain all of the information I am taught, and find myself connecting things outside of school to the lessons I have learned in the class. The kicker about this “perfect” class: we get our phones taken within the first few minutes.
Mr. D’Amore is my business teacher at RMHS this year. We recently watched a film called “The Social Dilemma”, which is a documentary about the marketing and algorithm performed by social media companies in order to profit off of the attention of their users. It exposes, in depth, how social media is intentionally created to be addicting to the people that use it. While watching the movie in class, many people were still hypnotized by the screens in front of them rather than the screen in front of the class.
This was the moment that I realized that phone addiction is a very real and serious problem, especially for high-schoolers.
The vast majority of people do not have a complete understanding of how much time those few hours scrolling accumulate in the long term. There is so much more to learn, live for, and do, aside from watching content on social media and playing games on your phone.
I think everyone struggles with an addiction to their phones to a degree, and the time lost from that is gone forever. I truly believe that people need to have this realization before they lose even more valuable moments to something so unfulfilling and wasteful in return.
