Kimball, Minnesota, has just 762 people, but the kids there are just as attached to technology as their big city peers. Kimball Area High School allows teachers to set individual policies on cell phone use in class, leaving first-year math teacher Katie Pettit with 70 distracted students to decide how to deal with.
In an effort to help her students focus during class, she offered them a deal — they had the option of giving her their cell phones for one week, day and night, and in return, she’d let them skip their final exam. Pettit would also be giving up her own cell phone for the remainder of the school year.
The young teacher believed the students would learn more by ditching technology in the classroom than they would by taking a single exam. Based on interviews they gave Minneapolis’s KARE 11, the students appear to have learned a lot more than just math…