Biology teacher, 35, quits in despair after desperately trying to get students to stop using their phones in class

Teachers are so burned out from spending hours trying to get kids to put down their phones that they’re quitting en masse.

Mitchell Rutherford, a biology teacher at Sahuaro High School in Tucson, Arizona, finally gave up after eleven years, feeling exhausted and frustrated.

He tried everything: a “phone jail” basket that few students used, teaching classes on social media addiction and meditation, and taking kids on nature walks.

But none of it worked. The students were unmotivated and openly said their grades didn’t matter, with half failing their classes.

Instead of learning, they put on their headphones during class and turned them off, saying this helped with their “anxiety.”

“I used every tool in the tool belt, and more than half the class didn’t seem to try at all,” Rutherford told the Wall Street Journal.

The problems started when school reopened after the pandemic, and have only gotten worse since – with this year being the last straw.

Rutherford, 35, said at first it was behavioral issues as students relearned how to interact with their peers at school.

“Students who are distracted are always the least happy, right now or later,” he wrote on Twitter in 2022 alongside one of the many hand-drawn motivational posters he hangs in his classroom.

‘But focusing takes practice and work! Concentrating on something strengthens the muscles, and noticing the distractions helps too!’

This year the students seemed to behave better, but it quickly became clear that the problems were still there, just beneath the surface.

“There was a low-energy apathy and isolation,” he told WSJ, recalling how it left him depressed and anxious until he realized phones were the problem.

Phones in the classroom, which school policy says are not allowed outside, were always something teachers had to be aware of, but kids usually went along with it.

“You can ask them, bother them, beg them, remind them and try to punish them, and still nothing works,” Rutherford said.

Comparing their constant phone use to an addiction, Rutherford tried to help them understand that the apps they were addicted to were designed to keep them scrolling.

He recalled how children would hold their phones tightly when he asked them to hand them over in class.

“That’s what an alcoholic would do if you tried to take their bottle,” he told them.

Rutherford and his fellow Sahuaro teachers compared notes on the strategies they used, eventually finding a few that worked.

But he said they were exhausting because as soon as he relaxed on enforcing them, the students would immediately “slide back” into doom-scrolling.

By February he had had enough and told the school this would be his last year, but on the way out he tried one more thing that finally seemed to work.

He challenged his students to a ‘digital detox’, where they tracked their phone use and tried to reduce it and spend more time in the real world.

They would then write a paper about the experience and receive lab credit.

The results surprised him, because students who didn’t care about their grades managed to drastically change their screen use.

Isabel Richey, one of his AP biology students, said she scrolled TikTok six hours a day and never studied for more than 10 minutes without opening it.

“I went on my phone at the beginning of every class and never got off,” she said.

The detox challenge took her back to one hour a day. She has read nine novels, feels less stressed and is generally in a better mood.

The success made him feel some regret about his departure, as if he were abandoning his students, but he felt consumed and exhausted and could not continue living like this.

Instead, he hoped to teach at an online prep school or a vocational school for high school students, both of which would produce kids who were more motivated and could put away their phones.