“Elle Fischer recently graduated from high school in Madison and is studying to become a middle school teacher”

“I see this new Roblox video on the sidebar next to my history assignment — what am I going to choose?”

ELLE FISCHER, 18, Madison, Wis.

She wishes YouTube had allowed her to turn off distracting recommendations.

Elle Fischer recently graduated from high school in Madison and is studying to become a middle school teacher. She thinks the district’s YouTube crackdown is a good start, but she wants schools to go further by assigning students less work on screens.

She said she kept YouTube open in a pinned tab throughout high school and procrastinated by watching “Bridgerton” clips or videos of people playing “Roblox.” She felt isolated even when surrounded by her classmates, all tapping away on their Chromebooks.

“A big part of learning is being engaged with other people and socializing with classmates, figuring out how to work together on the same problem,” she said. She worries that’s been lost in the modern tech-focused classroom. “Especially after Covid,” she said, “everybody needed that, but none of us were getting it.”

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