In the First Person section, Chalkbeat publishes personal essays from educators, students, parents, and others who think and write about public education.

When I started teaching in 2003, cell phones were a rarity in the classroom. Back then, using a phone to text was cumbersome at best, let alone access the Internet. I remember when a student tried to smuggle a phone into the Bronx high school where I taught, sandwiching it neatly between two sandwiches. The phone didn’t get through the metal detectors at the door.

Of course, our relationship with these devices has changed radically over the past two decades. Since returning to the classroom following COVID school closures, cell phones seem to function almost like an extra body part for my students, an ever-present extension of their bodies and minds.

And they’ve become the biggest window into American culture today. At lunch, recess, and before and after school, students sat alone, watching a movie or playing a video game. Even more bizarre, they sat together, faces engrossed in their phones; even in common spaces, they were isolated. It’s clear that teens – and adults too – are leaving the exploration, discovery, and connection to real life to our devices.

In a change in practice — which more and more districts and schools are adopting — the South Los Angeles public charter high school where I have taught for the past 15 years decided last spring that we will be a phone-free school for the 2024-2025 school year. The policy came with a recognition that our students deserve more: more space to be present in the classroom, more opportunities to connect with one another, and more time away from the screens that occupy all of our minds.

This year our school has a new library with books, games and sports equipment to encourage students to keep themselves busy without screens.

My classroom no longer has cubbies where students left their phones by the door. In the spirit of “out with the new, in with the old” and looking for ways to give my students new experiences, I brought in an old boombox and a thick book with hundreds of CDs. The albums had been gathering dust in my garage for a decade.

When I first flipped through the CDs, I found some nice surprises – some rare Wilco bootlegs from the early 2000s, some mixes friends had made from the ’90s, and a bit of ’90s hip-hop. I told my students to stop by in the morning before school or during lunch and pop in a CD, expecting… well, I’m not sure what I expected. At the very least, I thought they might discover new old music or laugh at my decidedly old-school CD collection (see: The Roots, Ben Harper, and the Grateful Dead).

Since school started a few weeks ago, students have been coming in droves to ask if they can play a CD. Some choices are more predictable – the Beatles and Bob Marley, always timeless – and others less so. But what has surprised me most is that each choice is an entry point for an unexpected conversation – a reminder of what life was like before the phone in our pockets answered every question and satisfied every need (and back when you actually had to read the CD liner notes to find out the lyrics).

…our students deserve more: more space to be present in the classroom, more opportunities to connect with one another, and more time away from the screens that consume all of us.

A Pearl Jam CD leads to a story in the magazine I created in seventh grade, Dissident, about the up-and-coming grunge band. A Counting Crows CD reminds me of the concert where the person next to me sang along at the top of their lungs to every sad, heavy lyric. My students and I connect through music, yes; more than that, we connect in a way that felt almost lost in recent years, when the screen was the default.

They see more of me – not my online self, filtered through Google Classroom or Loom or some other ed-tech app I could never understand – but the real me. My students, born in the MP3 era, have started bringing CDs from home, along with stories about their parents and cousins ​​and from swap meets. And those stories beget stories about what they like to do and who they want to be.

As their college application period approaches, with their personal statements and teacher recommendations, I am confident that I will give them some new insights into their inner selves.

I hope the CDs continue to be an attraction for my students and bring more of them into the analog dialogue that they – and I and all of us – need more of in the smartphone age. It will likely foster new ideas and take me to new places, maybe even a thrift store or two to find even more new old technology.

The other morning I brought home a copy of the New York Times, a real print newspaper, straight from my front yard. I hope the newspaper itself will be a topic of conversation and fill my classroom with questions, connections, and laughter.

Joel Snyder is a political science and economics teacher in the Florence-Firestone neighborhood of Los Angeles. In the 22 years since he started teaching and stopped listening to CDs, he has continued to listen to the exact same music.