Social Influences in the Classroom

Social media.  It's hard to remember what life was like before I had instant access to way more information about friends, family, and random people from high school at the touch of an app icon.  Now, within seconds, I can see what my cousin is making for dinner, how my friend's dog is doing after surgery, or every "selfie" shot that someone from high school has taken this week (even though I haven't spoken to them in almost ten years).  I can update my status, post a picture of my breakfast, creep on my favorite (or least favorite) celebrity, and watch a six-second video of someone's cat being cute all without having to leave the comfort of my couch.  The idea of being disconnected from social media makes many of us feel like we're naked, as if having that connection to the outside social world is as necessary as food or clothing.

What's even more interesting is trying to remember what classroom life was like before social media was available on every cell phone.  I can remember in high school using my brand new gel pen to write a perfectly worded note on actual paper, intricately folding it, and stealthily passing it to my best friend in hopes that it wasn't intercepted by our teacher or the cute boy we were writing about.  That was over ten years ago.  In the past five years since I first set foot inside a classroom in the role of teacher, I don't think I've intercepted one note.  And not for lack of trying.  But how do you intercept a note when it's being passed from cell phone to cell phone in the form of a text message?  When it's being posted on someone's Facebook wall?  When it's in a 150-character tweet?

Social media is an integral part of our lives, but it's influences in the classroom are becoming more and more of a distraction every day, and not just on cell phones.  At the school where I did my first full year as an English teacher, social media was an issue I dealt with every period of every day.  Students who couldn't even figure out how to use word to type up a research paper could figure out how to use a mirror site to log into Facebook and Twitter, effectively getting around the firewalls and security programs on the school computers.  Fights broke out between girls who has posted something rude on each others wall, while boys shared MySpace pics of scantily-clad girls, all of which caused a huge distraction from the poem we were analyzing or the story we were interpreting.  With every student having a cell phone with apps and internet access, the chances of totally cutting off students from social media influences in the classroom is almost impossible.

So how do we as teachers combat it?

This is the question I still don't have a great answer for.  I can make every policy against social media when we're in the computer lab.  I can ban cell phones in my classroom and follow every school policy in terms of cell phones and discipline.  But in the end, the social media influences from outside of my classroom will find a way to affect what's going on inside my classroom.  An argument will break out between students about a Facebook post; everyone will come in talking about the video that so-and-so uploaded, unable to settle down and engage in the lesson I'm trying to teach.

I hope you didn't come to this post expecting a solid answer you can apply in your classroom tomorrow morning to deal with social media influences, because you're not going to find one, at least not from me.  I don't have the answer to end it all.  Maybe the influence of social media is a permanent change in our culture, one that we have to accept and embrace, to find a way to work around it instead of avoid it.  No matter what, we as educators have to realize that social media has a strong influence in our students' lives and in our classrooms; to ignore that would be ignorant on our part. 

I think the best we can do is learn how to adapt our understanding of social media's influences on our students, establish policies in terms of how you allow it to influence your classroom, and pray that one day we can all revert back to handwritten notes on actual paper that can be intercepted and thrown away while we continue on with the lesson at hand.