I understand where you're coming from and in a room full of students, it's not possible to call out every single instance when a phone becomes a distraction. This article was about a small cohort so teachers were able to moderate use. My high school graduating class was 800 kids, it's unreasonable to put that kind of responsibility on teachers.

But on the other hand, I don't agree about a phone free environment being more productive.

The students that completely check out, often check out regardless of if there's a computer. Computers don't encourage that behavior, computers make it easier to hid it.

Teachers have always had a hard time detecting terrible things that happen. Even the school from the article, a very expensive, very small, low teacher student ratio boarding school had a fight break out between students.

I don't know if students are less likely to socialize with other students outside their preferred social group based on phones. I could argue that phones allow group chats and social networks of much bigger friend groups. The network will weigh a classmate you share a single class with equally to a classmate you share every class with.

It feels intuitive to blame phones as somehow causing maladaptive behavior, but if you include iPad and laptops into the argument, it no longer feels binary. Using individually assigned iPad and laptops have become as essential as textbooks were in the past. Even for middle schoolers, my school district has shifted to google classroom for assignments and digital textbooks.

I remember I was one of maybe a handful kids who brought a personal laptop to every class, senior year in high school. I was taking all AP classes except gym, so my teachers gave me the benefit of the doubt and weren't concerned about my work ethic. My calc teacher even introduced me to latex. Most of my notes were typed up that year. I know I would have had a much much harder time paying attention in calc if I was handwriting my notes. I didn't get distracted in classes just because I had a laptop, I got distracted when I was in a class where the teacher clearly didn't care about what they were teaching or when I didn't see the value in learning it.

Personally I am much much more productive working with some background music. Absolut silence and a phone/computer free environment makes it easier for me to lose focus. A caveat, I have ADHD, I know my experiences won't translate directly to the general population.

Unless you believe that students are objectively unable to learn how to self moderate technology usage, I see no point in delaying it. It's a skill they will need to learn at some point in their life. For those who struggle to learn it, the lesson will be much costlier in college. I believe that if it's normalized and introduced early, more students would pick it up quicker. I recognize this is ignoring the issue of how to build work ethic and passion to learn, those things aren't in direct control of a teacher.

I think there needs to be a different much bigger discussion on reorienting teaching and testing to be computer aided. Senior year, in physics I got to do a computer aided lab where I used a depth sensor to measure and plot the displacement of an object. From there it was possible to see the gravitational constant. That tangibility is so hard to get in physics and it would be impossible by hand.

It feels appalling to me that calculator/excel literacy is so poor for graduating high schoolers and undergrads. Part of it stems from an early association of the usage of calculators with cheating. There is no significant benefit in learning things like multiplication or division through rote arithmetic algorithms. Students enter a workforce where knowing hlookup, vlookup, and sumif in excel will cover 99% of the calculations they will need to do. But many of them graduate not understanding how to use a calculator and ratios to figure out unit conversion for things like baking.

It's fair to ask, how can teachers effectively grade students for take home assignments/essays in a time when students can use wolfram alpha or run a pre-trained GPT3/OPT models? I don't have an answer for that. But on the other side, standard teaching tools are showing their age. Textbooks are the worst examples. There are online programming textbooks that have embedded exercises where you compile and run code inline with the text and some algorithms even have interactive animations. Why don't we have the same for math exercises? 3Blue1Brown videos are prime examples of how much richer teaching and learning can be if technology is used properly.