His state banned phones in class. This Alabama teacher saw an instant change. 'It's magic.'

USA Today

7 hours ago

When Alabama enacted a new law keeping phones out of classrooms for the 2025-2026 school year, one teacher saw an instant change.
'Today, all of my students, 100% of them, took notes in my class, did their assignment, asked for help when they got stuck and turned it in, and then when they were done, they talked to each other,' Jonathan Buchwalter, a Tuscaloosa County High School 11th grade history teacher, said in an Aug. 8 TikTok that reached nearly 2 million views.
'I have been pulling my hair out for like, eight years. Has it been this easy of a solution the whole time?' Buchwalter asks in the video.
Thirty-three states have enacted legislation regarding school cellphone usage amid a growing push to restrict students' smartphone access in schools, primarily due to mental health and concerns about academic attentiveness. As the policies begin to roll out for the 2025–2026 school year, educators and parents alike are closely watching the on students and their mental health.
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Nearly half of teens say they're online constantly, according to 2024 data from the Pew Research Center, and 72% of teens say they sometimes or frequently check their notifications as soon as they wake up.
'They're chemically addicted to their phones,' Buchwalter says. 'They cannot experience anything that isn't constant stimulation.'
Child psychiatrist and Yale School of Medicine professor Yann Poncin says smartphones affect the brain in three key ways: impacting productivity and prioritization, depleting the brain's cognitive patience and threshold for tolerating frustration, and rewiring the brain's pleasure pathways and dopamine release.
'Your dopamine system, over time, over multiple events, is getting set in a way that to trigger a dopamine release and a feel good release, you actually now need this phone, because nothing else in life is regularly going to give you that level of satisfaction,' Poncin says.
Smartphone addiction is heavily tied to social media algorithms that feed curated content to users, but can also be impacted by color saturation, notifications and refresh screens. Over time, technology addiction rewires the brain to expect instant gratification, depleting the brain's cognitive patience and threshold for tolerating frustration in the process.
'If we over expose ourselves to these sort of easy dopamine hits, cheap dopamine hits when we're younger, then we're resetting our homeostasis where we can only feel good by having access to these items,' Poncin says.
The result is that teaching today requires more 'gamification' in the form of Kahoots, Quizlet or Jeopardy-style games to learn subject content. Buchwalter says he feels more pressure now than when he started teaching to be a 'stand up comedian' and 'game show host' in order to keep students engaged.
'We don't prepare our kids well for the adult world when we say, 'everything has to be fun,'' Buchwalter says. 'The kids need to take education seriously, even if it's boring."
Efforts to ban phones in schools gains traction
When Buchwalter started teaching in 2017, he said phones were still an issue, but it didn't feel like a fight the way it does following the COVID-19 pandemic. Even in Buchwalter's best-behaved classes, phones became a near-daily problem. More and more, he found himself interrupting lessons to police phone usage. He felt 'completely helpless.'
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'By that time, because the kids had been so wired for so long, had been so tuned into the internet for so long, during COVID and quarantine, they had lost a lot of their ability to self-regulate,' Buchwalter says.
For many students, this year is the first time they've navigated a school setting without constant access to devices. 'She had to actually socialize ALL DAY,' one Alabama mom captioned a TikTok of her teenage daughter reuniting with her phone after going without it all day. The post racked up 1.9M views.
Buchwalter says that up until this year, cell phone policies were largely decided on a class-by-class basis, making it a challenge for teachers to enforce policies that weren't standardized. Last year, he and other teachers experienced situations where students swore and acted out if asked to put their phones away in class.
'It was absolutely exhausting," he added.
In Alabama, students are required to leave any wireless communication devices, including tablets, pagers, personal computers and gamers, in lockers or personal vehicles during school hours. Opponents of the policy argue bans make it harder for parents to get in touch with their kids during emergency situations.
Buchwalter, however, says his classroom saw an immediate change.
'It's magic,' Buchwalter says, adding that he won't be able to make a final evaluation of the legislation's impact until the end of the school year. 'I expected there to be a lot more friction.'
It's a campaign experts like 'The Anxious Generation' author Jonathan Haidt have pushed for on the basis that phone-free academic settings provide kids with better opportunities for academic growth and socialization. Groups like Wait Until 8th and Smartphone Free Childhood encourage parents to sign pacts promising to delay giving kids devices until the end of the 8th grade, or even 16 years old.
Last year, if Buchwalter's classes finished a few minutes early, the room would go dead silent as kids reached for their phones. Now, the conversations happening in class are so vibrant that he has to ask students to quiet down.
'One of my favorite parts is when they're finished with their classwork, or they're in the lunchroom, they talk to each other,' Buchwalter says. 'It was like, 'oh my God, this is how it's supposed to be.''
Rachel Hale's role covering Youth Mental Health at USA TODAY is supported by a partnership with Pivotal and Journalism Funding Partners. Funders do not provide editorial input. Reach her at [e-mail] and @rachelleighhale on X.