Students can’t get off their phones. Schools have had enough
washingtonpost.com
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At this point, the problem has become too entrenched to actually do anything. Parents have come to the mistaken conclusion that Johnny needs a smartphone to keep in touch during the day (why exactly is a great question). Administrators have more or less given up. And without backup from administrators, teachers are left to fend for themselves. The ones who step in to take phones away, or deal with the problem in any meaningful way face threats to their physical well-being.
The tethering of kids to parents via phones is a tragedy of biblical proportions, but the effects will not be obvious for a few years yet. Education is just the obvious flash point.
I graduated salutatorian. I was able to focus on my homework after school for hours without distractions. I had a computer at home, but it was pretty crappy.
It isn't doomscrolling and posting endless selfies for dopamine.
I didn't graduate salutatorian, I was miserable and lonely because I got left out of anything outside of school by my friends because I didn't have a phone.
I still don't have many friends to this day and I sometimes wonder if my lack of a social experience in high school crippled my ability to develop friendships.
So I mean.. maybe there's different outcomes. Not having a phone doesn't automatically make you productive.
I hope my kid gets more out of the education system than I did, or maybe he will have better options like starting college early.
At minimum, the previous boredom regime taught you how to (a) be okay with nothing happening & (b) use your creativity to amuse yourself using the materials and capabilities at hand.
Both of those skills seem to have atrophied in post-smartphone generations.
My wife's had parents call their kids in class. Just to, like, chat.
If you want to see your kid, come have lunch with them one day or something like that
I know there are autodidactic folks, but I would know substantially less basic math, biology, chemistry, English, and history if I hadn't gone to grade school.
The world is a hugely different place now.
Duly noted!
But in today's climate, they informed the parents what happened, they socially ostracized him and his daughter, assumed the worst because they were denied the full context of intent.
Most mass shooting happen very quickly. Even if that kid can call 911 instantly, it's not gonna stop a buncha people from getting killed.
The Virginia Tech shooter, armed with 1 x 9mm pistol and 1 x .22LR pistol, killed 30 people (including himself) in roughly 8 minutes. Even with perfect knowledge and alerting there is no way police would be able to get there in time. Similar timelines for many recent shootings, with Uvalde being a notable and egregious outlier -- the cops were on site very quickly but didn't go in, the bloody cowards.
With iPhone or not, the reality is little Timmy is gonna catch two to the chest if something goes down.
Nobody ever asked us about it, it's simply school policy.
Kids are developmentally unable to cope with addiction.
Even adults have a hard time, with training, support, and wasted life experience with regard to online gaming. They may move past that addiction, but never really get over it.
Current times are just the flashpoint where parents and schools have largely abandoned their core responsibilities.
Taking away their phones because others can't handle themselves is wrong.
So yeah, a lot to debate.
Why, if it's during the school day? What's the advantage of having a phone during class?
A phone contains private photos and conversations, has authorized access to email, chat and (in other cases) social media accounts, it's a second authentication factor, it has payment cards, saved passwords, browser history, potentially health data (for example, period or medication notification app) and other data that they might not want anybody else to access, or could even cause them problems if the wrong person saw some of it (which doesn't mean it'd be something illegal or inappropriate - but some teachers have really weird ideas about how the life of a student should look).
It's perfectly understandable they want to have it under their own sight and control. Touching it without permission is unacceptable.
I have seen kids steal stuff from the teacher's desk/other school property when I still went to school - one kid even stole a RAM stick from a school computer right during class. I would never trust the school's ability to keep my phone secure.
Also - the school day is not 100% class time, there are breaks in between. What they do during breaks is their own business.
I don't why America constantly acts like we have unique problems no one does. Most schools in EU just bans cellphone usage during school hours either by taking it away or barred from bringing it in and it's just effective.
Humanity dealt with periods/medications/emergencies long before smartphones and can still do.
Why not bring it in? I don't understand why they should behave as if they lived in 19th century. They're people living in 21st century, making full use of new technology - nothing wrong about that.
It's bullshit to demand they have to go home to get their phone before they go on with their day after school - not to mention they use the phones before school too. My siblings buy breakfast and lunch with the virtual payment cards (from our parent's Revolut) they have in the phone.
Even their public transit tickets are apps - it's a QR code, and because the transit company wants to reduce staff, you pay 20% less if you buy tickets in the app. Will the school reimburse the additional 20% they caused them to pay? I guess not, right.
And remember Covid? Here in Europe the vaccination/test pass is an app too, and they needed it to get into the school building, the cafeteria, the public transit etc. Soon the ID and driver's licence will be apps as well.
The school itself is sending them homework and grades into an app, btw. It has web access, sure - but they access web on their phones. It's bullshit to make them unable to check their grades or homework assignments during schooltime.
Sure, they could go back to 19th century life with paper calendars, letters, money and transit tickets. But their quality of life would go significantly down. Schools have no right to demand that. Nobody has.
And as I said, school day is not 100% class time. What they do during breaks is their own business.
> Most schools in EU just bans cellphone usage during school hours either by taking it away or barred from bringing it in and it's just effective.
No, they don't. In my state it's very wrong to touch the phone - could be a fine and suspension (for the teacher/school employee) or even a crime, depending on what they did.
The school can demand it's turned off during class time (doesn't apply to breaks) but they have no way to verify or enforce. They can write a teacher's note in case of a disruption or take the student out of the class in serious cases, but they can't touch the phone.
Currently, the trend here is to integrate smartphones into the lessons. Make students use Google search, YouTube, Wikipedia, ChatGPT and other tools.
You may want to: https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/how-an-addicted-brain-work...
Additionally, each one of those apps has nearly full access to all your private information. Accurint goes out of their way to get most data about people.
That entire ecosystem lacks adversarial review. Additionally, coercively forcing you to only use those apps while removing more reliable methods for interacting is just one more way they can monetize you. You've got a rough road ahead.
Not sure what you mean about the reliability - the apps are more reliable than the previous methods like paper tickets. I don't really want to go back to standing in endless queues.
And no, these apps don't have nearly unlimited access to my private information, not sure where you got that idea. They have access to some of my personal information that I gave them, but they always had that access - the public transport app has the same information that I had to fill out in a paper form when buying a yearly pass, for example. And of course, my email provider has access to my email - news at 11.
Here in EU we have GDPR and DSA, that's enough adversarial review for me.
Reliability wise, I'm talking about messaging improperly handling timestamps, not sending messages but saying their sent, and silently discarding messages sent to you. Timestamps and other dated items are necessary for non-repudiation; or proving to a specific level that is acceptable as evidence in a court of law (to hold business accountable).
I've seen messaging apps, text messages (which are a messaging app), not display errors and silently update fields later or disappear the messages when compared with a separate device on the same network. You only see it if you happen to have equipment to monitor what the baseband modem is sending and it fails at the cell tower (which may not be official). Phone providers open a ticket, then auto-close them within 30 days without resolution.
The way these systems work, there's heavy coding theory so if a transmission fails, it gets resent. Its not a result of interference but of failures at infrastructure nodes.
So what might happen to the relationships in your life if you stop getting messages from your friends, and from their perspective they stop getting messages from you. You miss things because you don't know about them. You think they'll be your friends long? If they aren't having the same issue, do you think they'll believe you when you notice it without provable times just on your say so, and they discount date and timestamps since they get updated?
If someone did that maliciously to isolate you, you wouldn't know and wouldn't be able to do anything about it. People would look at you like you were crazy. You do it long enough and isolation does interesting things to your psychology, and if your thinking there's no reason for someone to target you like that, you would be wrong.
Political warfare, or the destruction of the national will, in part involves priming people's psychology so they polarize into groups that are complacent (don't respond), or lash out at anything they see as remotely triggering (similar to your attachment to a cell phone). This allows a smaller group during a destabilization event to seize power; historically.
There's a great book published and freely available on the USMC University website about political warfare and what it exactly entails. Bezmenov isn't that reliable.
GDPR and DSA are only reactive. What happens when the violators are moving targets (nefarious non-business).
Your email provider has access to read, and more importantly prevent you from sending email to others. Preventing communication without alerting the sender is how this is weaponized.
WhatsApp regularly uses your microphone in the background; maybe its location finding from your local power hum (50/60hz) did you agree to that or did they update the terms after the fact and continued use is acceptance?.
All these things happen regularly. The fact that you think they don't happen, and have discounted it so completely and are so attached to a device that literally can make you go crazy under the right causable circumstances looks like an addiction spiral to me or impossible levels of extreme ignorance about how you are manipulated on a daily basis (sheep-le) with no real thought because thought requires risking being wrong to learn what's right.
A non-attached person would simply say, I go with what works and leave it at that, and take a critical eye towards reliable methods being deprecated. It certainly appears you are attached whether you know it or not.
So - in my experience, when I find myself saying "why don't you just-" it's a flag that I don't fully understand the situation.
Use your imagination, in what ways could having ready access to a smart phone be a marked improvement in your ability to navigate the day-to-day experiences of a student?
You could take notes or record lectures, obviously. That's an easy one. One a related note, as an accessibility tool - you can automatically transcribe speech that you may be having difficulty following, and you can quickly look up definitions or even translations if you need to. Teacher just used a big word that you didn't quite catch? You could either raise your hand and interrupt their flow for the entire classroom... or you could glance at your phone and get your answer yourself.
Do you need to perform some sort of self-care activity periodically? Your phone can remind you that it's time for the next pill, or time to get up and stretch, or have a small snack to manage your blood sugar.
Along those lines, the assumption that it's so easy to just discard such an essentially integrated piece of modern technology comes off as subtle ableism, if nothing else.
Bollocks. Even on silent it's disrupting someone's attention, if only the owners.
And those under 18 years old aren't adults, and are wards of their parents. They're required by law to go to school and during the duration they're wards of the state. They don't get to own property in the direct sense that actual legal adults do.
> It's perfectly understandable they want to have it under their own sight and control. Touching it without permission is unacceptable.
They're kids, you think they're going to agree to that? Confiscate em -- put em in a box at the start of the day -- or else make them stay at home.
> I have seen kids steal stuff from the teacher's desk/other school property when I still went to school - one kid even stole a RAM stick from a school computer right during class. I would never trust the school's ability to keep my phone secure.
Then they can keep those phones at home.
> Also - the school day is not 100% class time, there are breaks in between. What they do during breaks is their own business.
This isn't a job -- there is no expectation of freedom in between classes. If they're in the building they're still wards of the state. They're just not in classes.
Listen, if this was a 19 year old on a construction site, I'd agree with you, but there is plenty of legal, moral, and basic cat-herding involved in having kids at school. You wanna get treated like an adult before 18 then drop out and get emancipated, otherwise thems the breaks.
You don't control it, the phone manufacturer and the app makers do. You may be shown something, it looks like fun, and then wastes hours, days, or months, on a simple dopamine 'loop' that's been designed (Octalysis Framework). You may spend a lot of money on worthless digital assets in the moment. Loot boxes for example.
When you are younger than on average 10 or 11, most children can't comprehend lying, deception, or deceit. They naturally separate people into two groups, the kids, and the adults because adults lie and can be deceptive but aside from that its not something the kids perceive clearly, and that's a biological developmental issue as well.
Its largely referred to as the age of reason, when you can start thinking critically and being able to recognize and tell lies is an important brain development. Incidentally what you are taught before and during that time is often accepted as true even if its not, and may be accepted as a true belief. Its hard work re-examining things critically that you thought were true but were actually lies (of omission or comission) designed to get you to think and behave in a certain way.
Now the ages differ individually, but for the most part there is always a period of time where you are vulnerable and have cognitive biases and blindspots, which is why it is important to have friends in different age groups, so they can point out things you don't notice. Some blind-spots never go away, and its a process of building up an association in those cases of some thing that triggers you to examine it critically.
Addiction is similar, you are mostly blind to it perceptually up until the part of the brain develops that helps moderate it, usually in your late teens, early 20s. That's strictly biology and varies to some degree but remains true.
Its still something that is very hard to do, but you are capable of doing that once the area in your brain develops.
For confirmation, you might look no further than objective observations about your and others behaviors to highly processed sugar treats. If your parents didn't stop you, would you be able to choose and have only 1-2 servings of your favorite sugar snack? or if left alone would you go through a long process of rationalizing just one more and before you know it the entire bag is gone. Even adults do this, but there's a variance in adults; there's very little variance in developmental stages.
Barring some excruciating/traumatic past experience, you would not be able to stop yourself. You would make yourself sick, because it tastes so good going down.
Also, phones are a leash. I know many parents who are perfectly fine instilling an omniscient presence via a spyware app that lets them track you everywhere you go, and punish you when they think you break a rule. My cousin got the brunt of this growing up, and would have his car taken away from him when the average speed would go above a certain threshold (and poor technical implementations in certain places bounce between several towers, so when you travel in an area your almost guaranteed to set off an alert). He got punished numerous times until he got the idea to take a drive, with them, in the car through that area (going the speed limit) to do something. They only believed him after he did that a large number of times, where the alert was setting off.
Anecdotally, fun fact, anyone with an antenna can actually do location finding like that. Its called trilateration, you learn about it when you start working with Ham Radio, and the requirements are almost nothing just need an adjustable dipole antenna ($15) and a SDR/modulator.
Some of the data might be encrypted, but IMEI number and a few other things are not and make you pretty uniquely identifiable over time. There are companies that aggregate this information regularly, and some non-companies that may use it for nefarious purposes (i.e. scam phone calling, deep fake etc). Risks are only increasing, if the experts can't keep up with the pace of trends, what hope do you have.
"You can't eat just one." Fortunately I seem to be able to easily resist the lure of potato chips/crisps and actually feel full after eating a few of them. I think the greasiness or fat content helps. I can enjoy the hyper-palatable salty, savory and spicy versions but a 200kcal bag is really overkill.
But some hyper-palatable foods are so well optimized that they can be really hard to resist; they press all of the buttons of deliciousness while making you hungry for another one.
Sugar is provably addictive and has been compared to cocaine, heroin, and other opioids for the flood of dopamine it causes.
Those optimized foods you refer to often simply have a lot of sugar processed into them.
But hyper-palatable foods aren't just sweet - they're savory, spicy, tangy, salty, fatty, all sorts of delicous! They also smell amazing. I recall reading that simply smelling pizza can be enough to cause your blood sugar to spike, presumably in anticipation.
Paradoxically artificial sweeteners can apparently raise blood sugar as well, as can black/unsweetened coffee.
Just depends on the school district.
We (and companies) need to ditch the equivocation and be honest about what we created.
(Edit) > Parents have been split on the issue, with many critics insisting their children need phones in case of an emergency.
Is a red herring and justification for helicopter parents to normalize their micromanaging.
Someone shouldn't be texting or calling on their cell in an active shooter situation anyway. One phone per teacher/room, with the ability for anyone to dial emergency services, is better.
We live in Plano, TX, just a few minutes south of the Allen Outlet massacre.
Yesterday my son texted me at noon "Shooting threat at school" and "It’s a rumor though but a lot of people are leaving anyway".
You can bet your life I was in my car and speeding down the street to get him out ASAP within 60 seconds of receiving the text.
The reality of schools and public life in the USA today means my family not being without a way to contact each other immediately, in real time, is a no-go.
It makes mass shootings a lot harder.
That's a 0.00057% chance your kid dies in a school shooting. You are being hysterical.
Tell me again how I am being hysterical. This country is going down in flames and not everyone can see the fire.
You are being hysterical.
(I am sorry for sounding dismissive. I pray for the safety of your family.)
I recommend you adopt such an attitude b/c it is healthier and b/c, when your story is retold, people will often want to touch you (so that the "good luck" rubs off on them)!
This list says 11 dead and 6 injured in 2023, but I concede that it omits incidents with fewer than 4 dead.
However, even including those, a couple years back I ran the numbers on odds of a kid even being present (not hurt or killed) during any kind of shooting at a school, over a 13-year K-12 school career, and I don't remember the exact figure, but it was low enough that I concluded none of this was worth any real concern on my part at all. And that's assuming shootings at schools are evenly distributed, which I'm sure they're not.
We're not even counting the shootings in general, like a shooting with no casualties is not something to be concerned about.
What you should have computed is P(his kid dies in a school shooting|rumor of shooting threat at school that enough people believe that they are leaving the school).
There are multiple layers of “bad” with this. If there is a threat, you’re hindering emergency response. Regardless, you’re putting everyone at risk by “speeding down the street.”
I don't trust law enforcement to do the right thing. I don't trust that grown adults sworn to serve and protect would act quickly to neutralize a threat that's not against themselves or their loved ones.
I see Uvalde playing out more than once in the future.
Your decision, were it properly weighed, would have to also assume that you could do better somehow but that is impossible (even if you were John Wick or Jason Bourne).
The hubris you display is enormous! Imagine that the American embassy had dropped an Chinese-American citizen into the middle of the square during the Tiananmen Massacre and demanded that he rescue the man under the tank!
Emotions got the better of you - you're in denial. There are a few more steps before you'll admit that retrieving your child was a futile and risky act for you, him and everyone else.
It actually would have been better if neither your son nor you knew about nearby shooting.
It had nothing to do with the school your son was attending. That you responded in a panic is due to a common pattern of miscommunication during an emergency. The least effective response to an emergency is everyone panicking and operating independently of each other and ignorant of the ground truth.
How did the rumor of the school shooting begin? Probably from another student responding to some quick take on their socials? What if they didn’t have their phone? Would this even have caused a false panic in the first place?
Everyone take the time to look up the road death statistics to remind yourself what you really need to worry about. Always use your turn signal, even for your driveway. Slow down, but not too much… drive with the flow of traffic. Don’t change lanes in an intersection. Don’t swerve out of the way of a white-tailed dear, just try and punt the thing with the front of your car and count the hang time. Yield to the right at a 4-way intersection. Again, always use your turn signal, even for your driveway… why the drive way? Force the good habit!
I live in Texas. My wife is a public schoolteacher. We are coming for your son’s phone and we will convince enough people to agree with us.
I checked the news just now and found this out: "AUSTIN (KXAN) — A shelter-in-place order was lifted for the Austin Community College Northridge Campus.
The campus issued the order at 8:50 a.m. amid reports of a possible armed person nearby. Police investigated the reports and issued an all-clear.
The shelter-in-place was lifted at 10:20 a.m., and the campus returned to normal operations."
So literally by just spending my time being nerd sniped on the internet and tweaking a Dockerfile I missed the entirety of this nothingness.
If people were able to handle not-it in 1920, it's probably a "nice to have" rather than a "must have."
Which, we can all feel very strongly about things that are nice to have, but people were also doing just fine before constant connectivity was a thing.
You didn't have telephone, but probably somebody nearby you could call and give a message.
You didn't have a freezer, but you had a butcher within walking distance.
And you didn't have a phone in your school, but you also didn't have retarded media that spread news that required.
Also you could probably have a gun on you, and if it was hunting season there would be plenty of guns in the parking lot to stop a school threat.
I still accept that if something happens, it's going to play out before I rambo in and fix things.
I have firearms in the house and am trained in their use, but I'm not a professional. In a chaotic, lethal situation, even my presence as a transporter is only going to increase confusion and delay professionals doing their job.
What's going to save lives (including my kids') in a crisis is their knowing (1) how to handle themselves, (2) stay present and think critically, and (3) follow good directions when they receive them.
Sadly, I think statistically it would help a lot. Obviously wouldn't completely solve the problem, but you have to have something pretty wrong with you to want to murder a lot of people at your school. And that likely shows up in other behavior.
But then, to me, "temporarily take guns away from a small segment of the population who has demonstrated, serious mental health issues" doesn't seem like a slippery slope. So I guess I'm on the "other side" of the issue. :/
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/how-...
And FWIW, I'm in the camp that we can't define "crazy" adequately. So, I'm all for limiting access to all semi-automatic firearms. Regulate them all similarly to automatics and other "NFA" weapons.
The 2nd wasn’t even incorporated until McDonald v Chicago in 2010.
I mean, Barron v Baltimore could not be more clear about this:
The third clause (of Section 9), for example, declares that "no bill of attainder or ex post facto law shall be passed." No language can be more general; yet the demonstration is complete that it applies solely to the government of the United States.... the succeeding section, the avowed purpose of which is to restrain state legislation... declares that "no state shall pass any bill of attainder or ex post facto law.” This provision, then, of the ninth section, however comprehensive its language, contains no restriction on state legislation.
However, your anecdotal experience is still a "false positive" (fortunately), which doesn't allow us to conclude that, in the case of an actual emergency such as a school shooting, children with phones are statistically safer than children without phones.
But I'm genuinely interested in such a study, and I believe data is already available for us to compare the differences in these kinds of occurrences before the emergence of smartphones in schools and after. That would provide a north for making decisions that truly improve security for us and our loved ones.
Nothing physical has happened to _us_. I can't stand up and say, "I lost a family member due to gun violence!". I still feel like things are spiraling out of control and there's nothing I can do about it. How do you stop going outside where other people are for fear of a shooting? How do you send your only child to school knowing what's going on?
I hope I can cope and hope that everything turns out OK.
I recently saw this youtube piece that shares the Swiss perspective on the topic of Gun ownership, and apart from some intended sarcasm in it that can bother viewers with distinct political views, the content has been worth watching:
You have badly misread the statistics on this, if you're that worried about it.
"Road traffic crashes are a leading cause of death in the United States for people ages 1–54"[0]
I wonder if you speeding in your car increased the likely hood of death for someone more than collecting your son from a rumored school shooting. Not saying you were wrong to do that, obviously this is something that comes to the front of your mind when something is wrong at a school. The disconnect between risks we find acceptable, and those we don't is interesting though.
[0]https://www.cdc.gov/injury/features/global-road-safety/index....
There were 40 students killed in school shootings in 2022 [2]. Assuming 50M students and 2K hours/year in school that equates to 1 death per 2,500,000,000 hours spent in the classroom.
The difference is a factor of 1,072 meaning that if you drive with your kid for 2 hours, you have exposed them to a higher risk of dying in a traffic accident than an entire year of risk from school shootings.
Definitely a stat I'll keep in my back pocket.
[1] my ass [2] https://www.edweek.org/leadership/school-shootings-this-year...
The key word is "react". It's disappointing and shameful that there's an apparent need for kids to have phones because of prevalent school shootings. If you aren't advocating for gun reform yet I hope you and others jump on board soon so that we can squash that fear and move on to mitigating the damage these computers in our pockets are causing to children and teens.
There was a time where school shootings weren't a primary concern and it was in my lifetime. It is possible to get back to that. We need to fight for it because it's not fair to the students that are traversing the school system, their families, and the ever climbing numbers of dead or harmed babies, children, teens, young adults, adults, and elderly and all living relatives affected by gun violence.
I feel like active shooters shouldn't be a situation in a school in the first place.
Could you explain what’s “difficult” about “SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED?”
It appears to be pretty clear cut to me. I’m not sure how anyone can conclude the opposite.
There's similar language in the other amendments in the bill of rights, "Congress shall make no laws" in the First Amendment for example, where we have and accept some limitation on those rights.
Does the "well regulated militia" clause imply an individual right to bear arms or only that the Federal government can't make laws to disarm recognized militias?
Ultimately in the US system it doesn't really matter what you or I think a particular phrase means the only opinion that matters directly is that of the majority of the Supreme Court. Even the current Court's interpretation of 2A accepts there are reasonable restrictions on gun rights they just need to be similar or comparable to restrictions around the founding.
Which years specifically before the NRA lobbied for the last 30 years? Anything before 1990? Please be specific.
1875 - US v Cruikshank. Held that states have the ability to regulate firearms independent of the Federal government.
1939 - US v Miller. Held that the "obvious purpose" of the 2nd Amendment was insuring effective state militias. Specifically insisting that only those guns usable in militia service and held for the purpose of militia service were protected by the Second Amendment.
Until DC v Heller in 2008, this was all settled law.
Until 1977, the NRA was focused mostly on firearms safety education, recreational shooting/hunting, and marksmanship/sportsmanship. A group of right-wingers took over at the 1977 annual convention and by 1980 was solely focused on expanding the 2nd Amendment and more importantly, financing candidates who would oppose any gun control. Reagan was the first president ever endorsed by the organization, and within a decade the NRA had tremendous influence on the Republican Party. And they funded an incredible amount of legal "scholarship" attempting to shore up the sandy foundations of their 2nd Amendment interpretation.
We live in the real world, plan accordingly. Your feelings about it don't matter.
Kids will refuse to give up their phones, make a big fight about it, so some parents would rather invent an excuse to give up and let the kid win.
Would be interesting if phones would be "addictive" to children used to playing outdoors in autonomous groups in (semi-nomadic, not city-based) pre-colombian civilizations.
Then years later, a researcher refuted the claim of the original landmark study (regarding addition), by giving the rats a sanctuary with other rats, area to roam, basically a mini park, I believe the rats either didn’t take the cocaine, or did it once and didn’t like it after.
Addition isn’t in a vacuum. Anything can be addicting. It’s the environment that matters as well.
Soldiers coming back from Vietnam were doing opium like mad, to a point where the US government was preparing for an opioid epidemic (ironic now), then found that rates of opium addiction were FAR below than perceived, most likely cause the soldiers weren’t fighting in a terrifying jungle 1000’s of miles away in a war forced upon them that was a losing battle.
It was morphine, and failed to replicate.
False. If any of that were addictive, the student would continue doing it even when other options exist, and continue doing it despite negative consequences.
> Schools are very artificial environments with a massive lack of stimulation
Correct but misguided.
Schools are artificial environments with imposed constraints. You're supposed to derive stimulation from being interested in the nature of the world around you, but that's boring, so at least derive stimulation from entertaining yourself within the constraints.
Everyone here has a story about hacking the school computers to play Doom (a learning experience and achievement, however subversive), but 30 years from now, none of these kids are going to be talking about how awesome it was to mindlessly watch TikTok during math class. None of them will remember what they even watched.
The phone has endless "stimulating" content, but it's not stimulating you to actually do anything but repetitively scroll through content you'll quickly forget. It's junk food for the brain, and only "stimulating" in the way stool softeners stimulate a bowel movement-- you shit it out long before you absorb anything of nutritional value.
Then buy a 30€ dumb phone. 100% of the parents I spoke with justify themselves with "all his/her friends have it, I don't want to create a social pariah".
My kids get phones in 9th grade, but it is clear they aren't to be on them during school. What sets me apart from a lot of parents, though, is that I'll believe and support their teacher.
Having been abused at three different schools, I hope that there's more nuance to it than simply "I'll listen to the adult".
Like what?
There are obviously ways around that -- a lot just won't bother.
And sure, someone that isn't that courteous might not be worth being around, but if it's a loose social group with a common interest there will be others there that might be.
Their social lives revolve around their phones. Not having a phone impacts it greatly.
One thing I've noticed over my 20 years in business - many, often very bright folks need to feel they work a moral job, doing good for the world. So far so good. But then we meet reality of gray office jobs with unclear positive/negative rating, ie working in bank is bad? But which type of bank and which job? Classic retail ones don't do crises, they store money for common folks so they don't keep it under mattress, and give loans to start businesses. Or working for google, is it the great-maps-for-free or tracking-the-hell-out-of-ya one? Same for facebook etc.
I am fairly strict on this topic and agree with you - we've created unparalleled addiction devices. Don't trust me, random stranger, check almost any kid with phone, which is almost any kid. Check their habits, ask parents, ask at school. Its pretty consistent and dark picture. There are ways to lesser the problem, but problem at its core is seemingly too hard - maybe kids actually shouldn't have their phones, rationing is already dealing with addicted (=fucked up for life) situation. Fucking up entire generation isn't balanced with saving few lives, even as a parent that's a completely stupid approach from any angle. Maybe we shouldn't listen to only most vocal folks in our communities? The loudest ones often have unresolved mental issues that distort otherwise good discussions badly.
But then we go even deeper - growing up kids these days is darn hard. State doesn't help much actually, if you are far away from close family and are not one of those few family-only types who can find life fulfillment for 2 decades straight, without any meaningful break, in just parenting. So folks little by little give up on being a perfect parent, and to have some time off they allow it. And then there is peer pressure. Remember a generation ago kids spent their lives in front of TV? And our parents didn't care that much, did they (little yes, but actually going and finding a new cool hobby for their kid? rare)
Schools need to radically overhaul how they operate so that they can compete with TikTok for student's attention. Banning phones is lazy. I want to see:
- Gamified learning, using apps like Duolingo. TikTok-style short form videos produced by top content creators instead of boring lectures from mediocre teachers.
- Opportunities to earn real money, power and status as a reward for school achievement. Good performance should grant perks like the ability to freely skip class to play videogames, study from home or earn an income during the school day.
- Autonomy: give students control over how they learn, holding them accountable only for the results.
I didn't have to confiscate a single phone over the three years before I walked away from the job. Lots of internal chuckles from me brought on by complaints about the signal quality in my room. Granted, this only worked because we had no student accessible WiFi.
I did worry about students being unable to reach out during an emergency, but cell phones were supposed to be left in their lockers during the day anyways and there was a landline in the classroom.
I wonder if any schools are thinking about legal jammers or even building new classrooms that are effectively large Faraday cages?
Some US districts used to jam, but the FCC doesn't like it. Something about blocking devices capable of calling 911 is the main trouble, I think.
> Throwaway accounts are ok for sensitive information, but please don't create accounts routinely. HN is a community—users should have an identity that others can relate to.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
What's prompted me to remind you is that I've observed this 'throwaway' account commenting quite combatively throughout this thread, which makes me think you've created the account to 'give you the freedom' do just that. Which is against the culture here.
Parents have been split on the issue, with many critics insisting their children need phones in case of an emergency.
What kind of emergency can’t be handled by calling the school or, as a student, asking for your phone or access to a landline?
What kind of private emergency decisions need to be made by 10th graders sitting in English class that require them to respond within seconds?
We should probably solve the root cause, but the 2A death cult does a fabulous job keeping people convinced that MORE guns is the solution, completely ignoring damn near every statistic shows more guns lead to worse outcomes.
But parents want to know ASAP so they can rush to the school and "help". Probably because police in the US aren't actually required to actively protect people. And have proven incapable of doing the job.
I'm sure the school office would've loved to handle all the calls for us, lol.
It's a fig leaf rationale to keep phones in children's pockets during class.
For myself it was mostly that parents could simply call me 5 minutes before they picked me up for my dentist appointment (which I had at least monthly for 7 years due to having braces) instead of me waiting somewhere for who knows how long because there was a traffic jam (and missing more schooltime than necessary).
They could simply call me/send me a SMS and ask me to pick up my younger siblings when they had unexpected work and couldn't make it in time - but since they respected me as a person, I had to confirm that I will do it and don't have other plans. Obviously, if I saw the question only after school that'd be way too late and they would have to force me into it instead of simply asking the grandparents if I said I can't.
Because why the hell shouldn't we use modern technology if it's available to us? Thanks to it we were flexible, and we enjoyed it.
Yeah, I also used the phone during class. Because the lessons were shit. Though we had a few very engaging teachers and even though I had zero interest in their subjects, I never used phone in their class.
Schools have to improve, taking phones away is just bandaging the symptoms.
>with many critics insisting their children need phones in case of an emergency.
>[...]
>But educators and experts say students need to focus on their surroundings during a crisis, not their cellphones.
It's pleasing to see the rhetoric shift on this one. Hopefully, in a few years, we'll all regard it as a funny mistake that phones were ever allowed in schools.
I went to a public school and don't really remember at any level of classes where my classmates were outright addicted to their phones - some would occasionally text or take pictures or whatever, but perhaps that was due to the limitations of what the device could do.
I do understand that modern problems need to be addressed with modern solutions, and smartphones, in a vacuum, aren't a bad thing - they open up a lot of avenues of education that were simply not possible when I was growing up....and I'm all for that, I think its better to prepare kids for the world of tomorrow rather than the world of yesterday. However, there needs to be a limit to how intertwined technology becomes with modern educational practices.
I dread the US becoming like China, where people's lives revolve around a smartphone from a very early age. Sadly, we might have missed that boat already.
>But many students — who use their phones for listening to music, arranging rides home, checking on grades or assignments — are unhappy with the crackdowns. Some check in with parents or coaches by text. Some think the decision should be theirs, not a school dictate.
This line is absurd. Why do you need to check in with parents or coaches during the day? You are at school, that is obvious. If parents need to get in touch, call the office and they can get the student. Or the reverse. It worked perfectly fine for the 100 years that phones existed before cell phones.
It's disappointing that a school superintendent needs to make this statement. School is entirely about infringing about students' "freedoms". No child would be sitting through any class if their freedoms were not highly infringed upon. Learning (at least initially, and for most kids), is not fun. It's boring. And kids don't like boring.
What's disappointing is that parents today also don't seem to understand this basic fact, hence the need for statements like these.
While true, I don't think this _has_ to be the case. Learning can be fun, so can school. But it's probably harder to make _more_ fun than TikTok...
But looks like paying teachers enough so that they could afford such luxuries as checks note renting an apartment for themselves is off the table.
Can't deal in absolutes like that, come on..
The school could always call the parent, or the parent could always call the school, right? Does the minute it might take the kid to answer the phone at the teacher's desk or walk to the office make that much of a difference?
The only way I see this being something that's truly time critical is if they're using "emergency" as a euphemism for school shooting.
Parents are regularly getting notified about school shootings several minutes before the police. I absolutely do not want a school taking my kid's phone in this increasingly common case.
Smartphones are great, but as the old saying goes, "moderation is best in all things". Kids/students do have to learn control, discipline, and focus. Otherwise it is very likely to have a negative outcome.
I would have expected it to be like taking a Game Boy or a laptop into a lesson, instant confiscation until the end of the day.
It's a new problem. It's going to take some time & experimentation to find the right balance.
Yeah, it's not 1998 anymore. Taking away Snake is not the same as taking away a student's entire social network. It's a hard problem, certainly, and we need to find solutions for it. But the situation has changed and the old solutions aren't acceptable anymore.
... during the school day. When they probably have several opportunities to talk IRL with the same kids. Hardly traumatic.
It's not taking away the entire social network. It's segregating work and play time.
If anything, we need to teach kids to lean in to the people around them, not wander off into Internet rabbit holes.
I don't have hard data on this, but from what I've observed there's a class divide, going about the way you'd expect.
Fussellian middle class and lower's the experimental group, Fussellian upper-middle and higher is the control group. Painting with a wide brush, sure, but that seems to be the state of things.
Parents' behavior and attitudes seem to differ above and below those lines, as do those of the kids, including how they treat kids who don't have phones.
Also, the kids are _in school_, their social networks are sitting in chairs, walking down the halls and eating in the cafeterias all around them. 45 minutes without checking instagram won't kill anyone.
In my experience, not really. Many young people these days are extremely online, chatting with people from all over the country & world, in addition to their local friend group. It's pretty wild.
> 45 minutes without checking instagram won't kill anyone.
Hey, see, we're already converging on a compromise solution :) The OP of this thread started with confiscating the phone for a full day, here we've reduced it to just in-class sessions. It's a tough problem! I don't know the answer! I don't think anyone does. What rankles me is people jumping to, "it's just a GameBoy/Snake, just shove it in a drawer for 8 hours," as the OP of this thread did. That stance is completely divorced from the real world.
Phones if used in class would be confiscated for the whole day.
That doesn't mean that they couldn't be used during breaks under normal circumstances.
In a lesson you either pay attention or twiddle your thumbs.
In my schooling you'd get in trouble for, say, doing Biology homework in Physics class, and rightly so.
Parents won't allow bans. Not only do kids throw fits if a phone is taken (see the teacher get pepper sprayed the other day because he took a phone a student was actively using to cheat during a test? Then an earlier video surfaced of a student punching him, though IDK if that one was phone related) but parents do, too. There's only so much schools can do if parents aren't backing them up—ultimately, the school board runs the school, and the school board's answerable to and largely made up of parents (among other locals, but parents are the most politically-active there, for obvious reasons).
Teachers and school admin would love to ban phones, but cannot.
A homework assignment would be on the whiteboard and instead of having the kids copy it down, they would tell them to take a photo of it. They used the browser often for the all kinds of things.
If a kid couldn't afford phone service they could use an inexpensive or second-hand device on the school's wifi. Apparently it was never a problem though - everybody had a phone.
By the end of high school, the kids are 17 or 18 years old - adults. Teaching them to use their phones responsibly isn't a bad thing.
The kids who first had iPhones in their teens or even tweens are now having kids. Many have been smartphone addicts themselves the last ten years or so. As an older millenial, my friends consider it unusual and unwise behaviour, a sign of my general eccentricity, that I sometimes leave the house with no electronics. How many adults experience discomfort when separated from their phone for more than a couple hours? They're in denial of their own addiction often, why would they see their child's?
Health advisory on social media use in adolescence - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35874670 - May 2023 (45 comments)
Teachers have a difficult job as it is, not to mention that they are already mistreated - they have almost no authority over students since they never have backing from parents or school administrators.
I recently came across a post on Reddit[1] where a student pepper sprayed her teacher because he confiscated her phone during an exam. One of the commenters claimed that the same teacher was previously punched in the face by a different student for taking their phone away after catching them cheating on a test. It is disconcerting to say the least.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/facepalm/comments/1397n4l/teacher_t...
Touching it without permission is unacceptable. Ask the student to put it away, pull them out of the class if they don't - but don't touch the phone.
If I were a teacher I'd ask the student to power the phone down and put it on my desk face up. Of course, teachers have to do tons that have nothing to do with pure instruction - they're essentially running an org of 20-30+ kids all day.
Obviously this creates quite a reputation with kids and school administrators... but what is a surprising is the occasional protest from parents wanting to talk to their kids all day. Her stance is "take it or leave it, I'm not changing", and she doesn't always get invited back by certain schools.
If they were caught playing on them or if it rang during class, the phone went to the teacher's desk til the end of class. If it happened a second time, it came to my office til the end of the day. And a 3rd violation meant it stayed in my office til the end of the week.
That last one rarely happened as any child who lost access for a whole day nearly went into panic mode without their pacifier for an entire day.
Companies could give students a special form of (e)sim card where the school could disable data and block calls that does not go to family, emergency services etc. during class, and then unblock it automatically when there are no classes.
I'm sure it's not as simple as suggested above, otherwise someone would have made it already. But perhaps there is a similar technical solution for this problem, as parents and schools are unable to fix it on their own.
Maybe in a banana republic, but certainly not in U.S.A.
They are to be put in a cabinet in a small bin. If they are not there...the kids do not get listed as being in class. Yes...There are a couple kids with no phone...but sadly only a couple.
I personally think this is the way to handle this. In this class's case it is a machining/manufacturing program it is especially important to have the kids paying attention due to safety issues. They are quite literally running machines that can kill people.
When I was young we were told to not bring anything that was a potential distraction from learning...for me or others. If we did, it was taken away.
This also applied to hair and dress code...not that I am against free expression or anything like that...but the point was that anything that took away from the educational process (again...of you or others) was not allowed. I remember kids being sent home for wearing inappropriate Tshirts or haircuts (dyed mohawk). This was not the 50s...this was the 80s-90s.
Not sure what changed...but in my case it is time as a parent to make an effort. There is no reason for my kids to have phones at school...They don't answer when I need them to anyways.
I am sure today's kids can easily get their hands on a junk throwaway phone to use as an "attendance" marker if that is really the rule (while still keeping their actual functional phone with themselves).
[0] https://www.apa.org/topics/social-media-internet/health-advi...
We also used to have a rule where if your phone made noise during class you'd have to bring the whole class a cake the next day. That was pretty fun.
I have no idea what’s going to happen when they start reaching their teens and above. How are they going to have a job or sit an exam?
sitting in a classroom was like sitting in a jail cell in my experience
public school was trash, the people who went there were trash
i'd much rather start a private community of people who actually give a shit about their children, fuck associating with all the violent randoms you get in public schools
youtube > teachers
starting a business in high school > college diploma
if your kid is capable of learning and inventing on their own, or in a group of ~equal peers, then you're only destroying your kids potential if they're in the public school system
i'd rather my kid use their phone than listen to one of the "education professionals" who use anti-empirical means while experimenting on other peoples kids
Of course schools are already way overburdened, but maybe a solution here has large enough positive externalities to be worth it.
We owe the many, many victims a phone ban in schools.
fuck phones.