Minnesota middle school students 'seem happy' after cellphone ban
newsnationnow.com
newsnationnow.com
When I was in school in the late 90's / early aughts we weren't even supposed to have our Discman or early MP3 players on school property. We all had them of course, but if they were seen they could be confiscated - I think it was largely an empty threat but I never saw anyone push it. Some teachers would happily allow you to use them in class.
They were also VERY suspicious any time you had your graphing calculator out outside math class, and some of the ruder study hall attendants would clear your calculators memory of games.
Gameboy or anything of the like certainly would not have flown. I remember my friend actually getting special permission to bring his laptop in.
What I am questioning is the why. Why did it stop. Why have the attitudes towards personal technology in schools swung so quickly?
Phones in schools seem like nothing but a distraction.
>> Phones in schools seem like nothing but a distraction.
> because cellphones became ubiquitous and admins never felt empowered to strictly limit them in schools
You're missing the point.
But there was a time when they weren't ubiquitous and admins did feel empowered to strictly limit similar distracting devices. It's anachronistic thinking to cite the present-day situation as a reason for a past change, when the conditions in the past were different.
This is purely hypothetical, but I could see a process for the change where teachers and admins were ignorant of texting, so allowed phones under the mistaken belief that they would not disrupt class, because students would only use them to make voice calls to parents outside of class (because it would be far easier and cheaper for students to talk to each other in person). Then a new status quo was established. Then the school's awareness of the harms came like a frog boiling in a bot: a little bit a time, and too slowly to motivate action until it was too late.
And the importance of cell phones to everyone’s lives (even children and teenagers) has massively increased since then. For schools to blanket ban them on campus or on the person of students in class would be swimming against a strong tide indeed. My guess is that the reason they don’t is that they believe that to do so would be constant war. And they aren’t paid enough for that.
When I was an elementary school student, I carried a few coins in the event that I had to call someone on a payphone. (Which happened very rarely.)
But today, we have no payphones. Well, almost none.
So what else could you do, with no payphone? Perhaps you could find someone else who had a phone that they could let you borrow. In years past, it wouldn't have been that uncommon to walk into a store or other place of business, or walk into your school office, and politely ask if you could use the phone. They might let you, or they might not, but it was a reasonable request.
I imagine today that it would come across a lot more suspicious. Why don't you have your own phone?
Both infrastructure and ways of thinking have shifted toward assuming that all individual people who might need to make a phone call have their own personal mobile phone.
Children being assumed to have their own phone is probably more of a grey area, but even so, things have changed, and there may be no going back.
And if they need to make a call, they go to the admin building, and explain why, and use the office phone.
Smart phones are constant dopamine dispensers. They create a dependency and cause human brains to go into withdrawal when not present. Once the science is laid bare I believe they will become severely curtailed in K-12 environments.
Are there _that many_ emergencies happening that the school office is unable to field calls from parents who need to reach their child right now?
I don’t see the “it’s like their wallet” argument either. That the phone is expensive and it contains personal information doesn’t mean it’s not disruptive to the classroom.
Ok, but yes, I suppose that does suggest that, for personal emergencies, the office won’t be too overloaded with personal emergencies to deal with all of them.
How often would the latency of getting to the office matter? I’m not sure.
If the latency of getting to the office matters, the teacher is already using the intercom to tell the office to phone in paramedics, and get the school nurse in to the classroom immediately.
I can't imagine any vaguely-plausible situation where calling parents (rather than the cops and/or paramedics) is the correct thing to do IMMEDIATELY and first. (SOP is for parents to tell the school about their kid's medical issues so that if they happen during the school day, their schoolday guardians will not be caught unawares... so "calling the parents to ask them what the shit is wrong with their kid" when the kid is in the middle of some serious medical issue isn't even vaguely plausible to me.)
Growing up I do not remember my parents having these fears despite there being a bomb scare (once during my schooling).
I remember my car breaking down and needing to walk to a rest area, to use a pay phone to call for help.
That and using pay phones generally as a convenience when I would bike miles into town, well that isn’t really available anymore.
I’ve had to knock on a door to ask a stranger to use their phone.
I’ve had to ask a store to use their phone.
A lot of this seems so strange now, like I cannot picture myself needing to rely on strangers and stores!
Thank you riverflows. I needed that.
1. Unintentional injuries account for 30% of all deaths of teenagers
2. Within that, suicide and homicide are the top two causes
3. Pretty sure its biological not narcissism that makes me want to make sure my progeny are safe esp when in a space that continually seems to be failing children and coming up with such mindbending solutions as more guns in schools
The school can totally do something about that, they just have to be willing to confront the student and enforce the rules.
What if the student beats other kids up, and the parent behaves similarly in response to discipline? Should the school tolerate that defiance, too?
The school obviously can't take the phone and throw it in a shredder or keep it for the year, but they can and should be able to keep it for the school day (and every other school day, if need be).
1: IIRC automatic suspension on first offense. Note, however, with most of the "zero tolerance" policies that were in place at the time, the offenses were significantly under-reported by the faculty.
Where do you even start? For a kid raised on phones, asking them to stop using their phone feels like asking them to cut off their hand. I imagine that most schools do have anti-phone policies, but there's a point where it's just too hard to enforce. Like other people have also mentioned, parents often pressure their kids to have phones in high school. As someone who went to high school after smartphones became popular, my mom would get upset when I want to school (or anywhere) without a phone on me. That means that teachers have to deal with a student body that's completely unwilling to follow the rules and parents that will back them up if you ever try. I certainly wouldn't bother enforcing a phone ban if I was a teacher.
It seems like this would be good reason to ban phones in school. I worry about the detrimental effects of not being able to concentrate. You could at least enforce school as a place to focus. If a student is using their phone during class, then they are not paying attention. It seems worthwhile to enforce this rather than give up on the kids.
Then there's the issue of kids having a high-value gadget that's easily damaged and at risk of theft in schools that never managed to solve old-fashioned bullying let alone whatever the kids get up to on social media these days.
If kids, or, anyone under-18 really, really needs a phone make calls, something like the original Nokia 3110 would be much more suitable than any smartphone.
And what do you want her to do? Stop the lesson until the student respects her? Remove the student from the classroom?
Two, I expect her to put a lot of personal effort into becoming at expert in motivation, behavior management, discipline for kids. I expect her to at least read ONE book about this. She complains for 2+ years about this that I've known her. I recommend books, she gets insulted and explains why it's not relevant.
IMO a teacher being paid $90k a year for 7 hours a day of work, 10 months a year, should be working hard to improve. But instead it's just a cushy job that no one gets fired from no matter how average (or below) they are.
Ps, I have never seen her take work home once in 2 years. So don't say the hours are long.
Tldr; I'd like her to do whatever other teachers that have better control of their classrooms do. Unless you're going to tell me there's zero variation in that amongst teachers.
What does she teach? One of my best friends is a foreign language teacher that leaves home for work around 6AM and is never back home until around 7-8PM. Partially because they have to coach for sporting events because the paycheck for just teaching is ridiculously low; less than $50k/yr last I asked. Fairly middle class area in a suburb of Chicago, by the way.
But yes, if what you've said is halfway accurate, it sounds like her and her coworkers are fairly underqualified and/or under-driven.
That sucks your hard working teacher is only making $50k. They should move to the San Ramon area and sit around teaching the kids of middle management of SV.
That said, school folks I know value credentials and authority toooons so recommending books without being "certified" somehow and having it eye rolled doesn't shock me.
Teacher salaries for San Ramon (and California generally) are publicly accessible (by band, and for some counties like San Ramon by name), so I doubt very much your soon-to-be-ex girlfriend is making $90k as a sixth grade teacher. She'd have to be fairly old and well-established as a teacher, or have multiple graduate-level credentials in multiple subjects (in which case she wouldn't be teaching 6th grade).
That would be out-of-band, especially considering what you claim to be extremely subpart performance on her part.
Indeed, it sounds like you're making this up to try and claim that teachers are overpaid and underworked. They're not, and it's especially rich coming from someone who is clearly an overpaid, underworked tech employee with enough free time this afternoon to devote all of it to commenting in this thread instead of doing valuable work.
I don't disagree that she should work to improve, but you are using $90K as if it were a lot of money. According to census data [1], the median household income in San Ramon is $173,519/year and the median rent is $2,557/month.
In San Ramon, you can get paid $65,000/year as an assistant manager at Starbucks without getting a 4 year degree plus teaching credentials.
Plus, how is she earning so much? The San Ramon teacher salary schedule is public: [2]
[1] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/sanramoncitycal...
[2] https://www.srvusd.net/documents/Employment/Employment-Resou...
Based on what you've said about your soon-to-be-ex girlfriend, she isn't either of those things.
This really shouldn't be surprising to anyone. Even 2 year old children can understand authority, power dynamics, and contests of will. For that matter, a 6 month old puppy will understand the same.
I pretty strongly disagree with the rest of what you said about state curriculum.
Or do you believe that every single teacher in California should be deciding how to teach what verbs are, or how dividing works, in their own way however they choose?
Is that really better than finding the best explanation, worksheets, and using that? Because right now there's a classroom in California being taught the worst possible way how to divide, out of all the other classrooms in California. Why? Because why not, freedom!
Second, teachers aren't fungible robots. They are humans with personalities, interests, and passions. Education works best when teachers are engaged. I think you underestimate the value provided by flexibility. you might be able to reduce variation through standardization, but that doesnt mean you improve the mean. My very best teachers went off script, teaching more valuable information, like a 5th grade teacher that decided to teach business, html, and the scientific method.
Last, it isn't exactly anarchy. Many subjects can be taught from texts, which are organized along standardized approaches.
Another simple fact is, that despite all that effort and forced curriculum and years of attending - most people don't understand even basic science. So I question, that the current system is working efficiently at all.
Do you expect better outcomes if they quit and you replace them with training videos?
Call me a skeptic, but I dont think standard lesson plans will move the needle for a shitty teacher that doesn't give a shit. They probably wont even engage with that standard lesson plan.
Yes
> Do you expect better outcomes if they quit and you replace them with training videos?
You still need someone to enforce the kids are actually doing what they've been instructed to but yes I'd expect an equal or better outcome.
There is no "best explanation, best worksheet" any more than there's a "best shoe size, best cut/style of pants".
Hire good teachers who care about their students, and let them figure out how to best address the needs of their students in that particular classroom.
Hear hear! If your kids turn out good, they'll say you are lucky.If they don't, they'll say you messed up as a parent. Either way, the parent never gets any credit.
So I mostly just try to model the behavior I want to see.
It does not mean children can do whatever they like.
You might find it difficult to find alternatives, but better alternatives than violence exists.
Save your children the costs of therapy as adults, and focus on real emotional health.
Does every dog / chimp / giraffe that got nipped by mom for being a brat need therapy?
I'm genuinely curious about this worldview, because I personally cannot empathize with this. It's abhorrent to me and my values.
If you walk out your door start groping people or try to run off someone's child, you will encounter violence pretty fast.
You couldnt make a post on HN if it werent for violence, or the threat of it. you have a computer to type on because if someone were to take it, they would risk beating or death. someone built the computer because threat of violence makes them work for a living instead of taking what they want. sometimes you can be minding your own business at a desert rave and violence comes for you anyways.
im saying all order, justice, and authority is based on violence. the only difference between an extrajudicial vigilante and a sanctioned enforcer, is that the enforcer is on the side generally considered more threating.
If you are sufficiently transgressive, violence is always a possible consequence, for children and adults. it is a simple fact of life.
Also we let/cause lots of things to happen to animals that would likely need therapy if they were humans, so this comparison really doesn't work.
I'm not saying you should spank your kids. I'm only questioning whether it actually causes any problems. I was spanked, my sister was spanked. All my cousins etc. None of us have any issues. We love our parents and loved that they loved us enough to punish us when we were bad.
Generally speaking, corporal punishment as such is not abuse, either. We've just become very sentimental, operating with a flawed understanding of human nature. It shouldn't be used lightly, but it shouldn't be demonized categorically.
It really doesn't.
> Even worse, grotesque "medical" procedures and treatments against which that swat pales in comparison.
Ahh, I see what you've got going on here...
If the answer is no: why do you think it's appropriate to do so when dealing with children?
(If the answer is yes, then consider anger management classes, I guess)
There are tons of situations where violence is appropriate for interpersonal conflict, usually when someone won't listen to reason.
If I went into your house, ignored what you were saying, and then started smashing things or molesting your children, would you just sit there and protest politely?
The earlier poster was arguing that corporal punishment is never appropriate. When they said "better alternatives than violence", they were speaking in the context of punishment.
A scenario about an urgent intervention can't prove them wrong, because it's not related to what they were saying.
> Doubly so when they include a bunch of condescension about how anyone who thinks violence has a place should seek therapy.
Are you actually reading their comments, or are you too busy being righteously mad at them?
They didn't ask if you think violence "has a place". They asked if it's what normally happens for your interpersonal conflicts.
Those two ideas are not at all close.
>They didn't ask if you think violence "has a place". They asked if it's what normally happens for your interpersonal conflicts. Those two ideas are not at all close.
I think it was an intentionally loaded and insulting question. yeah, im sure the poster normally resorts to violence interpersonal conflicts when they cant agree on a move with their partner.
Plus, it is just a crappy argument. The parent wasn't arguing that corporal punishment should normally be the tool to resolve issues, so it is a faulty comparison.
This does not prove that violence is sometimes necessary as a punishment. Punishments are very different from urgent situations.
You very much should be drawing a distinction.
The reason why corporal punishment isn't used privately man to man is because we've delegated that to government, who happily sends men with guns to drag people violently in for reform. Spanking a child before they get to that point would be a favor.
And when you say "drag people violently in" I feel like very different definitions of "violence" are getting conflated here. Forcibly moving a child is needed sometimes, and is not corporal punishment.
If you're actually interested in an answer here, it's pretty easy to find people for whom it did cause problems.
If you say it works great in your family, fine. For you to extrapolate and say it's okay for everyone is not fine.
In my own experience, my parents reached for violence instead of taking the time to connect and understand. Now I know I cannot trust them to listen or to take time to try to understand where I'm coming from.
It is super easy to find people whose lives were greatly negatively impacted by domestic violence, especially coming in the form of "loving punishment." That can fuck a person up even more, leading them to believe violence is a part of love.
children can be raised to do the right thing without fear/pain/trauma.
Well, yes. Relationships don’t do well when one of the partners has this much contempt for the other. There’s a difference between knowing in your own mind she’s not the best at her job, and calling her a “ditzy” “illogical” “girl” in public.
Let's say she was a damn genius. Do you expect her to have Google alerts setup for non official spellings of her school districts name? Is a genius supposed to be checking my browser history on my phone?
How smart would she have to be to find what I wrote?
>>>> Well, yes. Relationships don’t do well when one of the partners has this much contempt for the other. There’s a difference between knowing in your own mind she’s not the best at her job, and calling her a “ditzy” “illogical” “girl” in public.
>>> I don't call her that in public.
>> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38524596 is a publicly accessible URL. That’s what I meant. You’re assuming it doesn’t matter because she’s not smart enough to find it and recognize herself.
> Lol you're talking about having respect for someone I assume, but then you assume there's 'intelligence' in finding a random link in the world?
> Let's say she was a damn genius. Do you expect her to have Google alerts setup for non official spellings of her school districts name? Is a genius supposed to be checking my browser history on my phone?
> How smart would she have to be to find what I wrote?
How **** do you have to be to fail to realize "in public" does not mean "to her face?"
This is a public forum. Everything posted here is in public.
You're not as clever as you think you are.
2. Come on, you can figure out what they meant by "public". It's not in the broader spheres of influence that connect to her. She doesn't see this site, this site doesn't see her.
It should be obvious: that's the comment I was replying to.
> and even explicitly quote the stuff that has nothing to do with the "in public" you're responding to?
To preserve the context, because the original comment was deleted while the OP continued to defend it.
> 2. Come on, you can figure out what they meant by "public". It's not in the broader spheres of influence that connect to her. She doesn't see this site, this site doesn't see her.
Yeah, I did figure it out. But we're not Humpty Dumptys here, so we don't get to redefine words on a whim.
In short: that's what he meant, but that's not what "public" means.
Going by what you wrote, you were replying to this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38524906
You didn't say a single word about the next two comments in the chain. So I don't see how they act as context.
> Yeah, I did figure it out. But we're not Humpty Dumptys here, so we don't get to redefine words on a whim.
> In short: that's what he meant, but that's not what "public" means.
It's close enough.
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize."
The strongest plausible interpretation is that you would use a different word than "public", but it's a pointless quibble. Not "How **** do you have to be", "You're not as clever".
Those insults are wildly unfitting for a complaint about wording.
For example, I don't argue with every person I meet in public. I was actually a top 0.1% salesperson for 10 years nationwide in my industry. I do great meeting women and have fun on bars. In public I'm great. On a random website, not in public, I'm different.
Oh. Right. We're at Hackernews.
Do you mean school-issued calculators, or personally owned ones?
If the school cannot provide a necessary resource, that's a larger problem.
If you're not treating kids' devices as special in a bad way, you'd never even think of making that the rule!
> But they shouldn't be allowed to control what's on a personal device.
Minor students seem to have a different standard for rights. Schools regularly have dress codes and stuff. Presumably they'd say "you can have games on your calculator if you want, you just can't bring it to school."
It didn't feel oppressive, either, it felt appropriate - like setting a tone, even when we were defying the rules lol
What do you want students to do during recess? There's only 1 full basketball court and 2 single courts. We only had access to half the grass field for whatever reason so that limited soccer (and yeah, no full contact so Murica Football was soft banned. You could throw the pig skin and that's it).
If that's a shared experience, it's no wonder my generation is so scrutinous of authority.
We played “touch” football on the asphalt where touch was only a strong suggestion. We went to the nurse a lot.
In the late 90's in California, we had an open campus (no fences) and the classrooms were freestanding buildings without enclosed halls. Some students went to lunch at businesses a few blocks away. The cool kids would enroll in one period that included floating permission, so you could basically leave campus whenever you wanted. There was far more weed and ritalin than smoking or drinking. Because of parental pressures, there weren't many students who were lazy or fuck-ups.
HP 48G(X) represent. IR beam compilers, apps, and games to each other. Also, the very powerful universal remote app that could control any TV at a long distance. No one else ever touched my calculator except to verify clear memory for placement tests.
The computer lab was full of absolute shit PS/2 25 and 30, and PCjrs, but that wasn't a problem because of the laissez-faire un-management and lack of control freaks that didn't stifle creativity and exploration.
In my estimation, 97% of my graduating class went to college. Of that cohort, most ultimately became millionaires with a few centimillionaires, and a few became moderate names in academia and professional trades. (I once made the mistake of unwittingly agreeing to a blind date with someone from my graduating class, but she (a dentist) was so embarrassingly inconsiderate, unrelatable, ill-mannered, and late that I had to cut it short. Some people are just so awful that they're entertaining clichés and good story fodder.)
I'm just going to leave that there.
Or your Tamagotchi! That was probably much more similar.
Our school wasn't too strict about walkmans and the like, because no one was really distracted by it during classes. Tamagotchis on the other hand...
That would have been a huge bummer becuase I wasn't playing games on mine, I was writing programs. It was actually the start of my professional programming career technically. I sold a copy of the program I wrote via link cable to a fellow student for $1... 8 years before apple was selling $1 mobile apps ;)
better than making it seem like you had just done it yourself, you could use the Menu() function to simulate all the menu navigation necessary to actually get to that screen!
funnily enough, jabbing all the buttons on the calculator and having to select functions via menu listings created one of the comfiest development environments I've ever used. after a while, banging out a screensaver or fake menu became second nature.
Add a cryptic name, blank screen on start with a short timeout to return to menu when a key combination is not pressed and nobody will ever notice.
Car, meet traffic jam. But few, if any saw this one coming. Oddly enough, today's readers would find any story based on this premise mundane - kind of like a story about a traffic jam.
From the article:
> “We do see a huge, huge difference in the way students are connecting with each other,” Smith said, later adding: “Just a short two years ago, they spent more time just looking down at their phones every moment that they could, and so it has become the culture of our building, and again, the kids seem happy.”
In the 1990s, a cell phone was an expensive toy. Today it's almost impossible to function as a member of society without one. Everyone, even, kids under 8, simply must own one of these damned devices, carry it around at all times, and respond to its every demand.
Public schools were a mess before all of this. But the cell phone has turned all of the problems in school up to 11. It has done so while offering little to nothing in return.
Is this satire? I don’t need a smartphone, anything that lets me answer a call would work, and I’m in my 30s. Always connected internet isn’t necessary, it’s a crutch.
The unexaggerated version would be "Many people, including children and their parents, feel compelled to buy smartphones in order to fully participate in modern society." Whether they are right to feel that way is a good point to ponder.
If all of your friends and family communicate with video calls, do you want to be the one guy with a flip phone? Maybe you do! But not everyone shares that view.
the fallacy of limited choices. you could most certainly make-do with a dumb phone.
I for one, would buy a phone that had a strong camera + only basic features built with the aim of reducing distractions.
For when my kids do get phones, I want a way to disable social media in blocks for different mac addresses/different times. Anybody know of a device that I can bolt on to any network to add that functionality?
Interesting. I wonder if putting some money (charity, etc) or other skin in the game would increase compliance and how many parents would agree to that. I could see this working at a small private school
That said, I'd rather a "wait until 18th"...
Where are you that high school starts with 8th grade? is that still called "freshman year"? I'm in California and have never seen a school like that.
In my time in university here, I didn't hear that language being used. Wikipedia tells me that Canadians use "first year" to indicate its first year students, but "frosh week" is a thing. I did my undergrad in the US, though. Even there, if I ever heard somebody say "sophomore," it would have come from the mouth of a confused freshman.
But in undergrad, it's all pretty standardized, at least in my experience.
Is it that uncommon? I get that it's probably harder to enforce into the upper grades...
Much easier to just make your school have some thick walls that prevent cell signals :)
People assume they can reach you by phone these days, especially if you're the parent of young-ish children.
Sure. But in this story the school fell back to the "old-fashioned" way and sent someone along to the guy's house. It seems clear that the guy got along just fine without being reachable via telephone.
That's a non-sequitur. My assertion was that the fellow in the story got along just fine without being reachable by phone. He may have regretted how he came to become unreachable by phone, but he received the relevant information in a timely manner.
Meanwhile I would bring my PSP to school and just leave it in my locker as it was the perfect MP3 device to walk home from school with, or use it for football/track game days.
I can tell you I’m happy to not be getting constant emails about cell phones that you just know parents who don’t care aren’t reading/ won’t do anything.
I have a child in that specific school.
Reading some interview transcripts I remember them mentioning that the kids felt that since their whole social group was without a phone (everyone in the school had to leave their phones at home or in storage boxes) at the same time they did not feel like there was anything that they might be missing out on, and subsequently could rather relax and focus on face-to-face interactions instead.
This site is currently unavailable to visitors from the European Economic Area while we work to ensure your data is protected in accordance with applicable EU laws.”
Translation:
Thank God for American visitors because we don't have to care about their privacy.
>This site is currently unavailable to visitors from the European Economic Area while we work to ensure your data is protected in accordance with applicable EU laws.
Just repeating the headline doesn't make an article, it is literaly 3 sentences long...
This makes it sound like you only read the three bullet points underneath the headline and didn't bother scrolling further, down to the parts where the middle school principal discusses the policy (aka, the actual article).
Is it really his fault, or is it horrible UI/UX design?
Get approval to run your own short-range cell site that has a whitelist of IMEI (or IMSI, if that's not available) numbers, and blocks all non-emergency calls made by any phone that's not on the list.
Put the staff on the whitelist, and give parents the option to put their phones on the whitelist when they're visiting.
I get that teaching well is hard, but I cannot rid myself of the feeling that some teachers are leaning on the tech because actual teaching has gotten too hard. For one thing, it seems like they don’t have many options to deal with kids who prevent the others from learning.
It’s just sad all around. I’d put an end to smartphones if I could, and not just in schools.
I believe in what you're saying, to an extent, and even am grinding my schoolwork with a flip phone, but at this point I think the onus is on the parents to encourage productive habits and make the kid understand WHY the addictiveness is so implicit and dangerous.
if you don't have anything to replace the scrolling with, you will return to scrolling.
best of luck with the kids, imho meditation worked best for me kicking my phone addiction