Yondr: Yay or Nay?
Written by: Suri Desai
As I stand in what feels like an infinite line of people waiting to unlock their phones with the metallic gray magnets attached to the brick columns on a long Friday afternoon, one thing is clear: we have come a long way since last year.
Going into freshman year was already busy enough without having the gift and curse of my phone sitting in the side pocket of my much-too-large backpack. Yet this year, without the pings and dings and occasional spam calls in the middle of history class, our campus can feel both utterly quiet in places like the library and busier than ever in the quad. With the constant buzzing of phones traded in for the constant chatter of high schoolers, it’s time we asked ourselves: Yondr pouches– yay or nay?
Besides the annoyance of not being able to text your friends, zoom in on the Snap Map to figure out where everyone went, or worst of all–the new 8:20 start time, are Yondr pouches really taking away anything from our lives?
Junior Charlie Pope doesn’t think so, saying, “I thought that the phone thing was gonna be a bigger adjustment, but I really just do not care, and I feel like that’s most kids too. It’s really just not that big of a deal having your phone, especially with computers.”
His take is true, who needs a phone when you can play Brawl Stars on an iPad?
But the real reason why we have the pouches is so people can interact with one another without the distraction of social media.
Mrs. Beauchamp has noticed a major improvement in students’ socializing, remarking, “In advisory or homeroom or lunch, kids are talking to each other, I don’t always have to say, ‘have we said hello to everyone?’ like I used to always make my kids do before they put their cellphones up.”
Charlie disagrees, “Lowkey, it’s been pretty much the same jive. I haven’t felt like it’s helped my social life.”
For the freshmen, however, Yondr pouches seem like a worse replacement of something they already had in Middle School.
“Hypothetically we could just do what we did in middle school and put them up at the start of the day and then get them back at the end of the day, and the advisors can have phone trees,” says freshman Kharis Ott.
This may be hard to implement due to some advisors not having rooms to put phone trees in, but nevertheless, people still wish there was another method of putting the phones up besides Yondr pouches.
Sophomore Ben Perkins has even gotten injured by the pouches a few times, “I’ve got cut by them a few times, once on my leg and another time on my hand, but overall I’m fine with them,” he says, pointing to where the cuts are.
Regardless of injuries, it seems like Yondr pouches are here to stay, and the general consensus isn’t yay or nay, but rather that they’re just okay.
