I have literally built a dungeons and dragons campaign to learn statistics, and had some students on their phones. I'm not a dancing bear, and having a dopamine panic-button makes it near impossible to engage with anything challenging (I struggle with it too and know it's an anxiety crutch, but it's super maladaptive).

[–] fidodo@lemm.ee 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I fully support kicking kids off their phones in class, I don't think any lesson no matter how engaging can compete with that. I'm not supposed to be on my phone during meetings, I think it's perfectly reasonable to ban phones from class. I was just commenting that work can be done to make lessons more engaging when phones aren't involved. There's of course a limit to what you can do, and some subjects are just inherently harder to get kids into, like statistics. But seriously good on you for doing that. I'm sure that while it didn't have perfect engagement, it was far better than just teaching it to the book.

Just curious, is there a place you can share that lesson plan to other teachers? It'd be a shame for all that work you did to not get to be used in other classrooms as well.