One Arizona high school teacher is resigning over his students’ addictions to their phones.
The constant use of smartphones in his classroom has driven Sahuaro High School’s Mitchell Rutherford to tell Fox News last week that he is “giving up” being a biology teacher because he can’t control phone usage.
“I have been struggling with mental health this year mostly because of what I identified as basically phone addiction with the students,” he commented.
After being a teacher for 11 years, he has resigned. He said last week that he has implemented a “variety of lesson plans” to try and make it clear to his students the negative effects of constant phone usage.
“Here’s extra credit, let’s check your screen time, let’s create habits, let’s do a unit on sleep and why sleep is important and how to reduce your phone usage for a bedtime routine, and we talked about it every day and created a basket called ‘phone jail,’” he told Fox News.
He likened the phones to other addictions in the area: “Opioids, obviously a huge problem, cocaine, heroin, all of those drugs, alcohol, it’s all a big problem, but like sugar even greater than that and then phones even greater than that.”
He said that “something shifted” in the kids during the Covid-19 pandemic and that their addictions to their phones got worse.
