Do you know how many hours you use your phone daily? As years continue to go on, phones begin to become more advanced with different types of apps and features. Apps, new features, and social media makes it a lot harder to stay off of the phone. Staying off the phone is a concern when it comes to school and work but things keep advancing and becoming better and more fun. Age doesn’t matter when it comes to social media or phone usage, adults can spend the same amount of time on social media as kids/teens do. Apple products have an app that can tell a person how long they have been using your device for. As days go on, your daily average is calculated and every Sunday, you get a notification of what your daily average was for the week. A lot of students in school use their phones a lot more than they realize, so when they are able to check their screen time they are shocked. 

     I went around and asked a few peers about their screen time if they felt comfortable sharing with me. I was able to get four answers:

• Peer1: 10 hours and 56 minutes 
• Peer 2: 7 hours and 39 minutes 
• Peer 3: 1 hour and 6 minutes 
• Peer 4: 5 hours and 6 minutes 

     These numbers are all over the place. There can be people who use their phone for working purposes and entertainment purposes throughout the day so that’s why people could be using their phones for 10 hours or people can use their phones for an hour a day and they just use their phone to listen to music and they have a lot of other stuff to do and know how to manage how much time they spend on their phones. Then you have the people in the middle who slightly know how to manage their screen time but still are having a hard time putting it down. 

     Most students in the school use their phone in almost every single class, it’s become a part of our daily lives. Especially since we’re still trying to settle back in after that whole year of being on zoom and being able to do whatever you want like nap and snack whenever you feel like it. It can be very hard to focus on school and want to use your phone at the same time because you can’t do both. It is much more important to pay attention to class and what is going on in the classroom but realistically, it’s much more difficult than it seems. Even though there is a cell phone policy set in place, that doesn’t affect much of what students do with their cell phones. It’s mainly the students responsibility to take action and do the hard thing and avoid the phone to get a better education and learn much better in class. Even though I have a hard time trying to put the phone down in class as well, I feel like I could be on my phone and listen at the same time but it’s pretty hard to get to understand what the teacher is talking about and trying to text someone back about something completely different. Many staff at the school and many adults in general like to criticize how much and how long students/children use their technology. Many adults are also hypocrites, they could scroll for hours and hours. If students overuse phones and start being dependent on the phone, I can understand where adults would get frustrated. Phones are a fun tool to have and they may seem like a necessity in this day and age because almost everyone has a cell phone, but people were able to communicate without cell phones. 

     In the halls, classrooms, cafeteria, etc., all you see are people using their phones. It’s something that both students and staff can’t get rid of but they can work on the usage of their phones especially in a setting like school where you have to focus on other things instead of who texted you or who posted this and who posted that. There is a place to use your phone and there  is a place to take things more seriously and not focus on other things that can be done and finished later. I myself have been working on the usage of my phone in class and I’ve been improving but I still have a lot more improvement to go through. In order to be successful, you have to be able to risk things like this so you can get your things done and be the best version/hardest working version of yourself you can be. But also remember to enjoy everything while it lasts.