- cross-posted to:
- usa@quokk.au
- cross-posted to:
- usa@quokk.au
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I mean, are phones conducive to learning? If not then forbid their usage at school and bloody enforce it. I think the fact phones became common place for kids so quickly and so early in their lives coupled with just the general insanity of American schools so often being under attack, the schools have just lost any agency to restrict them given their usage is already rampant.
I live and teach in a state that implemented a ban. Results after year one were marginal improvement. Many just did the “hiding” trick more than before. A number didn’t think we’d notice them hunched over whispering to their watches. It was rather comical when they would do that.
Imagine a world where teachers weren’t geriatric and taught their kids digital literacy instead of digital luddism.
I mean, shit, homework was invented as a fucking punishment and so many studies have shown it has diminishing returns after a certain age. Yet here we are, perpetuating a system designed explicitly for controlling kids - not teaching them.
But yeah, phones are the problem. The internet is the problem. Definitely not how kids are taught to interact with them, no sir. While we’re at it, just get rid of PCs at the school - that way the district can save money on their IT department. They can access social media from the PCs so I don’t see the problem.
Can we just ban them in general? We used to be a proper society and had our phones on the kitchen walls with 25ft cords.
Back in the good old days when homosexuality was a felony, the cure for autism was an ice pick lobotomy, and certain people would be killed for being caught in nice neighborhoods? Proper society.
Minus the lobotomies, that’s still happening.
Jesus, show us on the doll where the bad man hurt you why don’t you. Can we not have a joke about anything benign these days without someone coming along to make it about the wrongs of society? And before you say it, yes, the things you mentioned were wrong.
Chill out, I wasn’t making a statement about race relations, intolerance, bigotry, or medical ignorance. It was just a joke about long phone cords.
You must be a miserable bastard to spend much time around if this is how to react to such things in real life as well.
My kid is not going to the murder factory without a phone. I’d be happy to scream at someone in a room over it. Guarantee my kid’s safety or they’re bringing a phone.
Not to be a jackass but what will their phone help with in this supposed murder factory? If ur so worried about a shooter or something, it’s not like the phone puts them in an invincibility bubble or something.
IDK man how could having 300 portable, accessible ways to call 911 in a shooter emergency possibly help in that moment?
C’mon guys help me figure out this MENSA-level brain-twister.
Having students alert 911 in that situation is insane. Their priority should be either running away or hiding, neither of which is helped by getting on a phone call. If that’s the point hire someone whose job is 100% just doing that and make everyone safer for it.
He can call me and I can come help. It’s not much, but it’s something that gives me peace of mind a little bit.
Headline: Americans support a measure that won’t fix anything and sounds good on paper
Don’t see why they can’t just have locked down WiFi networks so only staff and school equipment can use it and then have some sort of localized cell phone jamming that automatically turns off if a fire alarm or other alarm is triggered for emergencies.
I’d sorta think this is a good idea but I’m not really down for putting cellphone jammers or anything like that on school property. Freedom comes first.
The solution is to fund schools better for better education programs and more staff who would be able to handle rule infractions better. Harder to use your phone in class when 3 staff members are around engaged with the kids.
I wonder what the results would have looked like if they added questions to see the difference in acceptance between banning smartphones vs banning dumb phones.
A third of the country still thinks Trump is doing a good job. They probably don’t even know the difference
My position on this is really weird because I’m in support of laptops being in classrooms for educational uses. However, I’m against cell phones being in classroom.
That being said, as someone who grew up in a school system that didn’t allow the parent to communicate with their child or a teenager, meaning that they couldn’t call the school to have them relay a message, I am firmly against a straight ban period on school grounds. I was given a phone because my parents’ work schedule was very fluid and could change within an hour or two. And on more than a handful of occasions, my mom would call the school and be like, hey, you need to relay the message to get on a different bus because there’s no one going to be home, And they just wouldn’t relay it. It also helped if I chose to go to a friends house after school
I’m also disliking how they skewed the results. If you read the actual study, you’ll see that they merged the kind of agree strongly agree and the kind of disagree strongly disagree categories to make it a binary choice, but then chose to omit the six percent of the people who said they didn’t care or had no strong opinion.
they also removed any results where the person chose the first option or the last option on every question. And I dislike any type of automated data sanitation method like that, because while they did randomize the first and fourth answer, every time, there’s always the possibility that someone legitimately answered everything as either the first or last answer. My own vote could be stated that since I strongly agree that the cell phone shouldn’t be in the classroom, but strongly disagree that it should be straight banned. So if question one and question two had the polarity of question one and question 2 flipped, where one was strongly agree and one was strongly disagree, it’s entirely possible I would have been removed from the survey as a fraudulent result.
edit: removed couple sentences that drifted from topic some and fixed a repeated line
It’s twice the same survey no ?
I think this is a tough one to weigh in on depending where you come from. If I lived somewhere where the news talked about school shootings a lot, I might want my child to have a phone.
Go after the companies making addictive applications instead.
It’s not that hard. You keep it in your backpack, and never take it out the whole day while school is in session.
When I was a kid in school, you had to go to the office to use the phone.
My school at least still had a payphone near the cafeteria we only got rid of in 2011.
Same, and I feel like that should be the only phone available. Us older millennials didn’t have phones, these kids don’t need them either during school. Now I’m not against them used at lunch time or breaks, that’s there time
To be fair there was infrastructure then that doesn’t exist now. Most phone boxes are basically just public urinals now for example, I mean they always were but you could usually expect a phone to be in there too. People were also used to remembering numbers, but the only numbers I remember these days are my own and various landlines from my childhood which have been disconnected for over a decade as people did away with traditional landlines, then the VoIP bridge replacements which just became a way to receive international tech support scam calls more efficiently.
I personally want to see smartphones curtailed more generally; if I had absolutist power a lot of the adtech sector (at least surveillance-based behavioural recommendation algorithms) would be legislated out of existence on public health and democratic integrity grounds for example. I’d like to see e-ink smartphones become a wider market segment too, as these inherently break a lot of ‘dark patterns’ and also make short form video content less viable in favour of text content. I don’t think we can just take smartphones off kids and dump them at eighteen into the psychological manipulation engine that is the modern adtech sector without wider structural reforms to our relationship with smartphones and the internet.
I honestly think it would do a lot if all sorting algorithms were made open source.
We would quite quickly have mapped out how their algorithms work and which companies are the most predatory
Just make them leave it off. Anyone caught using a phone gets it taken away the rest of the day.
That’s what we did with anything that was distracting when I was growing up. You can have it on you, but if they see you using it. It goes into the principal’s office until EOD.
Yeah the issue with this is that it becomes a major pain to enforce.
Tones of schools have no phone policies but no one enforces it.
Students won’t give them up and parents get upset because they can’t contact little Timmy or because his 1500 iPhone is in someone’s desk.
You don’t necessarily need to take it away, there are other avenues of punishment. Detention, Saturday school, no extra-curricular participation, suspension, etc. I was in high school right as dumb cell phones started to become a thing and those were our punishments if we were caught with phones out. We were allowed to have them, but they had to be either off or on silent, and in our bags (same as CD/MP3 players.) We were allowed to have them out to check them only during lunch and before and after school, or if we had to make a call, in the main office. I completely agree that kids shouldn’t be using phones AT ALL during class time, but there’s ways to allow them to exist and punish inappropriate usage that doesn’t require teachers taking them. Teachers shouldn’t be taking phones, that’s a liability risk and not worth the effort.
How would it help for children to have phones during a school shooting? Everyone on the staff already has one.
For real. What are they gonna do if their kid specifically calls them directly? Go all Rambo on the shooter?
A parent is more likely to go rambo and be helpful than cops or teachers, just look at past school shootings where cops didnt do jack sht
I’m a man with a very particular set of skills…
Go after the companies
Sir this is a Merica.
As a mom of two in a country where school shootings do happen far more frequently than anywhere else in the world, the US, I fully support completely banning phones from schools. The benefit to my kids education overall far outweighs the minuscule chance something would happen where they need their phones or a shooting took place. I say this also as a former American student who’s school did go on lock down a few times for active shooters in the area, like the time a local bank got robbed or when they found a “kill list” some kid made. It just doesn’t make sense to me to degrade education across the board in the very very off chance my kid, or even myself, was at the location of a school shooting.
Are you suggesting a phone would stop the shooting?
I was thinking about a shooting that happened in Norway. Some of the children called their parents. It didn’t stop anything horrible from happening, but they left the world knowing they were loved.
Bring back dumb phones
Landlines
let the mobileks get dumber so the content creators can get smarter
You would need to make them dumber/more controlled. A dumb phone with unlimited texting is still going to be a distraction.
Maybe spamming children should be illegal
I’m talking about kids texting each other.
When I was in highschool I had an app to help calm me (recommended by my therapist) because I had such severe anxiety problems. I know there are things you can do without an app but it was helpful when I was panicking so much I could hardly think. I don’t think a blanket ban is appropriate. Phones aren’t inherently bad and it really depends on how they are being used. It makes more sense to revoke phone privileges from individual students if they can’t use them properly.
Devil’s advocate take: was the phone app the only way to ease your anxiety, or was it just an option that was recommended due to the trend of trying to have our phone do everything?
I could have had a note and a texture thingy (I would rub the screen and textured case to self soothe) although the phone is more discrete cause everyone has one.
Digital devices will always be a potential distraction, even with just simple calling and messaging. What amazes me most though, is how far we’ll stretch to avoid regulating the actual actors causing the most harm (social media).
