Before I became a journalist, I worked as a teacher, and one year I had a third grader who was sometimes reluctant to participate in class. One afternoon, instead of writing down three math problems that were on the board, he was busy rolling a clump of boogers (as children sometimes do) across the top of his desk.<\/p>\n
I told him I\u2019d give him a dollar if he could write down the problems in less than 30 seconds. He promptly did it, and\u00a0I handed over the dollar. Do you think he wrote down the next few math problems on his own?<\/p>\n
\u201cGive me another dollar,\u201d he told me. I refused. He went back to rolling the boogers.<\/p>\n
But perhaps an administrator in the nation\u2019s capitol will have better luck bribing students than I did. Diana Smith, the principal at Washington Latin Public Charter School in Washington, D.C., is offering her eighth- and ninth-graders $100 each if they can do one thing that most adults would struggle to do: Avoid all electronic devices for an entire day once a week.<\/p>\n
I challenge them to stay off of any screens\u2014so television, games, phones, tablets, everything.”<\/p>\n
And she does mean \u201call\u201d electronic devices. \u201cI challenge them to stay off of any screens\u2014so television, games, phones, tablets, everything\u2014for the 11 Tuesdays that we have of summer break,\u201d Smith told WTOP on Monday.<\/p>\n
Smith said she came up with her Benjamins-for-ditching-devices plan because she was concerned about the amount of time students spend staring at screens. \u201cKids have these phones under their pillows at night\u2014they\u2019re going to bed, they\u2019re texting each other at 3:00, 4:00 in the morning,\u201d said Smith.<\/p>\n
Seventy-eight percent of teens check their phones at least once an hour.<\/p>\n
A survey released last year by Common Sense Media found that 78 percent of teens check their phones at least once an hour, and half of teens surveyed said they think they\u2019re addicted to their devices. It\u2019s not just teenagers who are hooked: In one well-known study, college students who were asked to avoid all electronic devices for 24 hours expressed symptoms akin to drug withdrawal. \u201cI was itching like a crackhead,\u201d said one of participant.\u00a0<\/p>\n
What Smith is also concerned about is that during the summer when school is out, a kid could potentially spend the majority of their day texting friends, posting to Instagram, maintaining their\u00a0Snapchat streak, binge-watching a show on a streaming service, and then getting in a little video game action. All that screen time leaves little room for reading, spending time engaged in physical activity, or socializing with friends and family members. Hello, summer learning slide!<\/p>\n
Given that, it\u2019s understandable that Smith would want to bribe her students to avoid devices for at least some of the time. The principal said she thinks only about 50 out of 160 eligible students will be able to complete her challenge. In order to get the cash, the\u00a0kids will also need to have two adults vouch in writing for their efforts. But in the future, will they give up electronic devices on their own?<\/p>\n
As Edward Deci, a human motivation expert and professor of psychology at the University of Rochester, told The New York Times<\/em> in 2013,\u00a0bribery doesn\u2019t really work in the long run because you\u2019re trying to get kids to modify their behavior \u201cmore or less ongoingly for the rest of their lives.\u201d As Deci put it\u2014and as I found with my booger-rolling, dollar-demanding student years ago, if you\u2019re not going to offer a reward every time, bribes can backfire big time. Still,\u00a0if each of Smith\u2019s students manages to abstain from screens once a week for the rest of the summer, she could be out $16,000.\u00a0<\/p>\n Screenshot via Black-ish<\/em><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Before I became a journalist, I worked as a teacher, and one year I had a third grader who was sometimes reluctant to participate in class. One afternoon, instead of writing down three math problems that were on the board, he was busy rolling a clump of boogers (as children sometimes do) across the top…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1143","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1143","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1143"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1143\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1143"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1143"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1143"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}