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Comment by Pulcinella | Hacker News Reader

My thoughts as a High School teacher:

I have tried[1] to allow students to have their phones, teach them to use their phones responsibly, etc. It doesn’t work. They are banned in my class.

I’m just a single teacher with basically no budget. I can’t compete with giant corporations that spend millions on design, UX, UI, etc.

[1] Also, technically trying to teach kids to use their phones responsibly (or even generically teaching them how to be responsible adults) isn’t legal state standard for any of my subjects so I could get yelled at by parents or admin for doing it and I would have no recourse. It’s unlikely to happen out, but it is something admin can use if they don’t like you and want to nail you on something.

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When I was a student I didn't care about the ban in class - seemed reasonable to me and generally fair.

The rules that bothered me were the ones I thought were unfair or didn't make sense - not being able to use the phone in the hallway or between classes to call a parent/organize something later in the day. We had teachers that would grab it out of your hand and take it from you.

Our school also had an 'upstairway' and a 'downstairway' though where you'd get yelled out for going down the upstair way and have to lap the building to get to the downstairway though so they weren't really about reason.

> not being able to use the phone in the hallway or between classes

I was confused about some of these, like a teacher literally posted at the bathroom door and would only let X kids in at a time, and time them. Turns out it's because a few bad kids take advantage and do stupid shit, so they have to impose draconian policies.

The 'no phone in hallway' thing was probably half to get kids into class on time, and half to stop drug deals, gang fights and sexting. This goes on in "nice" schools.

I suspect you're right that they had some reason behind it they never discussed with us (and couldn't provide when asked), but it's not very effective (drug deals and sexting still happen anyway) - meanwhile I felt like they had no respect for us and so I had little for them as a result.

I think to some extent people rise to the standard expected of them - if you don't respect kids at all and have draconian rules that prevent them from doing basic things they'll just dismiss you as an obstacle.

I feel the same. Unfortunately, the teachers are told what to do by the principal, and the principal is told what to do by the parents and the school board, and both of those groups are comprised mostly of total jackasses.

> Our school also had an 'upstairway' and a 'downstairway' though where you'd get yelled out for going down the upstair way and have to lap the building to get to the downstairway though so they weren't really about reason.

It may seem like no reason to you, but I've witnessed a much higher flow of people when the direction is set and nobody goes "against the current".

This is one mistake I made the first time I went to Japan: I was going "against the current" at the train station and clueless me was wondering why it was taking so much effort for me to make progress...

Even entrances to some public bathrooms now have a divider that splits people entering from people exiting (you can see this at airports sometimes).

Yeah but when you have 3min to get to your next class (or you get detention), you can't run, hallways are crowded, and you have to walk across the building to get to your class that's right downstairs it feels a bit kafkaesque.

We also weren't allowed to talk during lunch for half of it.

> We also weren't allowed to talk during lunch for half of it.

You’re giving me ideas - a child who likes to chat and isn’t particularly interested in food can draw out a meal for an eternity.

It's not only competing with the addictive nature of smartphone apps, but competing with a child's interests too. Personal anecdote, but, going to school and learning stuff was more about discipline than enjoyment, that only came later on subjects in college I actually found interesting.

But I do support that method of education, and I also support a ban on smartphones by extension.

> I also support a ban on smartphones by extension

I support a ban during class. Between classes, however, it seems fine to let students co-ordinate extra-curricular activities on their phones.

Kids standing around checking phones or kids talking to each other. That the basic choice. The trade off of some small convieneice seems worth while.

If hadn't thought about it much, mobile phone didn't exist when I was at school. However I recently visited a school as a prospective parent and they had a strict no phone policy. Locker or lose it. After listening to the principle talk about the problems they had with bullying, distractions, social status, I'm supportive.

I can see that not being able to co-ordinate activities could be a non-trivial inconvenience, though.

No teachers ever taught me as fast as a computer can today. State school are an anachronism.

Out of curiosity, how would you say you "learned how to learn", so to speak? Did it just come naturally to you? Was it a parent who taught you?

Can you cite studies showing that unsupervised online education is more effective than supervised/classroom?

In college if i was goofing off on my phone during lecture I would likely pay for it on an exam.

You could try silently writing down which days you saw a student on their phone & which days you taught the specific subject material.

Then when students get it wrong on a test that you grade you can add a comment along the lines of "this was covered on day X when you were on your phone"

You would also then have a nice report for parent student meetings, and the parents can do the enforcing

Except the general purpose of school is for the children to be educated, not to make a smart comment when they fail an exam.

It was just a thought. I feel like the teacher should not be tasked with policing phone useage, but teach kids to take personal responsablity for their actions / education.

Maybe this wouldnt be effective, i just thought after one or two of these exams kids might take initiative to not use their phone as much.

I was not imagining a passive agressive one liner to the students, but i understand how it sounded that way lol

> Then when students get it wrong on a test that you grade you can add a comment along the lines of "this was covered on day X when you were on your phone"

In my experience, by the time you realized you failed the exam, it's often too late to start learning all the things you didn't think you needed to learn.

Which is also one of the reasons for which I hated exams as a teacher.

I was thinking the first couple would be a learning experience and kids might curve their behavior over time. (Maybe this was a terrible idea lol)

This is petty and time-consuming.

Being petty and being effective are often related as a teacher.

Cramming for tests has poor long term retention. So, even if it seems like a final should be enough to demonstrate competency it's generally a poor idea to upgrade a grade based on a final.

It wasnt intended to be petty, i thought of it more as giving students more personal responsability to pay attention.

I was just trying to throw an idea out there lol

I think all of the complaints with your idea that center around "exam time" being too late would be addressed by sensible quiz policies. i.e. classes should have quizzes frequently, which individually aren't a huge component of the grade, but also which repeatedly cover past material so students can get the benefits of spaced-repetition. The notes correlating phone use can be given on the quizzes.

The only issue I have with your idea in spirit is that it does nothing for the other innocent students who get distracted by the people goofing off on their phones, but this might just be addressed by cracking down on distracting use but if people want to quietly text or browse the web under the desk for the whole period that's their business / responsibility come quiz/exam time.

this is the same problem with photo radar speeding tickets. We know that for learning immediate correction is super-important, so just like getting a ticket in the mail several weeks after speeding, a note after you fail a test will just piss off the receiver and there's no long term training effect.

also, don't you think teachers have better things to do with their extremely limited instruction time than police and inventory cell phone usage?

I'm not familiar with exactly what teachers do these days, but I feel like it's a stereotypical teacher behavior to notice students who look like they're not paying attention—in whatever way, be it staring into space, reading an unrelated book, etc.—and call on the student and ask them to explain what they were just talking about. I'm not sure whether that's a good or bad practice, but it does fit the bill of "immediate correction" that could straightforwardly be applied to students looking at a phone.

They already are policing it. Stopping class to argue with some kid is much more disruptive than writing down a name

> the parents can do the enforcing

Why should the parents do the enforcing?

If I goof off and get bad grades I would likely pay for it in my future career opportunities.

The point was that the teacher shouldn't have to do it.

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