Over the summer, Steck Harwood challenged me to slip in as much Gen Z slang into my speech as possible, to which I responded. “Bruh”. In that spirit, I hope you are looking forward to Eduardo’s food, which is bussing, and my deepest thanks to Nick and his team for the glow-up our campus received over the summer. Sorry, Steck. That is all I have.
What I actually wanted to talk to you all about today is radioactive spiders and poker. I’ll come back to those ideas in just a minute
This year, we have two changes that we are very excited about – the first is the new daily schedule.
Change, even when it is as thoughtful as this, isn’t easy. We know it takes time to adjust to a new daily routine. We believe that our new system makes it easier for teachers/students to know which class is next, minimizes the impact of early dismissals on any given class, provides more time for deep learning with longer class and TAP sessions, and creates more time for advisory and community programs.
You’ve got this. Expect a lot of communication from us, and through the power of John Utsey, some nice details, such as adding all the classes to your Google calendar.
As for the change in the Upper School cell phone policy, there is a lot to say. Please forgive me for telling a couple of quick stories. When I was in Middle School, I rode the bus, and I visited a comic book store almost every day while waiting at the bus stop. Each month, I eagerly anticipated the arrival of the next comic book in the series, and I was captivated. I loved the artwork, the storytelling, the underdog heroes, and the scheming villains. And while I haven’t kept up with the Marvel movies, I’m intimately familiar with Spider-Man, the Hulk, and the Fantastic Four.
I was always particularly interested in their origin stories; A quick trip down the rabbit hole this summer revealed that there are several categories of superpowers:
- Wonder Woman and Thor received their powers through Divine Intervention:
- Green Lantern got his power through a magical ring – no wonder no one watched that movie.
- Doctor Strange received his power from an encounter with what AI called Mystical Entities.
- My 100% favorite source of super hero power is Accidental Mutation: “Exposure to unusual circumstances, like radiation, or alien substances, can lead to unforeseen abilities (like Spider-Man, the Hulk, and Fantastic Four)”.
Like Professor Xavier’s Academy, this school exists to ignite the potential within you. To help you find your superpower, which in Peter Parker’s case came from the bite of a radioactive spider.
I could go on for a long time about how and why phones, social media, and the surveillance capitalism they contain are detrimental to our sleep, academic achievement, emotional and intellectual development, and social connections.
To switch analogies for a second – there’s an old poker expression: if you can’t find the sucker in your first 30 minutes playing cards at the table, you’re the sucker. In modern capitalism, if you’re not paying, you’re the product. That means the free apps that almost all of us voluntarily spend time on, and currently, more than half of US teens spend an average of 7 hours and 22 minutes of daily screen time, are selling us. Your attention and the attention of people like you is a commodity in the world that is sold. Everything about your phone and the apps within it is designed not to make you calmer, happier, or more peaceful, , but to make you more emotionally upset and outraged. – So you’ll spend more time online being profiled and marketed to. It’s not just the revenue from the ads that you view; your consumer profile (a summary of everything you’ve ever entered or paused on) is also being packaged and resold. Your phone wants you to be a consumer, not a healthy person.
Academically, we know that being away from your phone for the day can make a big difference-
- Frequent interruptions can literally diminish your effective IQ and make you respond as if you are impaired by drugs or alcohol.
- Students distracted, for example, by notifications buzzing on a phone in their pocket, tend to score on average 20% lower on tests.
- Furthermore, the lack of connection with real literature and real news impairs your ability to think empathetically and creatively, and all of us know how much our school and our country need creative and empathetic thinking.
Teachers here know that some of the highlights of our year come from our experiential trips, where we leave our phones behind and enjoy nature, meals, hiking, river rafting, and camping. Each year, I talk to multiple groups of students who express appreciation for the freedom they felt during that brief period of being out of cell phone contact. And they often wish that they and we had done more to build social connections between them and their peers earlier.
Every year, we have students who struggle with loneliness and find social connections with their peers difficult. Building social connections has always been challenging, and we, as a school and as a society, would be foolish to support anything that made it harder.
One of the worst parts of being on your phone is that it gets in the way of chance encounters. My 9th-grade year was uncomfortable socially (folks didn’t seem to be that impressed with my large comic book collection). In the first week of Mr. Williams’ 10th-grade English class, I managed to make a connection with a new student named Matt – we laughed at the same joke in class, and after class, we struck up a conversation in the hall. Pretty soon, I made it a habit to stop by his house after school and shoot hoops with him and his dad, a Spanish teacher at our school. Matt and I attended different colleges, but we stayed in touch. The punchline to my story – he became one of the most important people in my life. He stood up with me at my wedding, and I stood with him at his father’s funeral, which came much too soon.
Simply put, this life-changing friendship never would have happened if I had been on my phone. A phone-free environment at school can and will improve the relationships in your life, and as the research indicates, your relationships are the largest factor in your overall life satisfaction.
Rest assured, even though Dr. Prochaska and his chemistry students occasionally set off the fire alarm in the Chem lab, we’re not going to expose you to radiation here at Prep – but we can help you find your superpower, which is you – your heart, your mind, your feelings, your time, your empathy, your curiosity, and your leadership. You’re not superhuman – but you don’t need to be – we’re here to support you.