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Comment by tokai | Hacker News Reader

There is a huge cap between 'learning isn't always fun' to 'breaking the human right to sanitation[0] will aid learning somehow'.

[0] https://www.ohchr.org/en/special-procedures/sr-water-and-san...

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So to ensure students can use a bathroom if they really need to, but aren't abusing it to just take a break every class (missing maybe 25% of their class time? Say 15 minutes per hour class) you'd agree to something like an app to track it?

No not at all. The idea is absurd. Even entertaining that it could be a solution is suspect. If students leave class too much they are marked as absent. It works many other places in the world, without having to do some creepy surveillance of kids bodily functions.

Are they marked absemt on some kind of app?

We used to use a piece of paper called an "attendance sheet", with ruled lines on it. You can think of it as an excel-like app, with touchscreen stylus functionality and good battery life.

Not a teacher, but yes. The very same app that teachers use for grading, is my guess. The teacher does the attendance tracking. The app just records what the teacher puts into it. The teacher is free to take notes of when people leave and enter. If most of the class time has the students seated then a student walking around likely is very eyecatching. (What do blind teachers do? Roll call + the honor system is my first guess. Maybe handing out bathroom passes manually would be a viable Plan B.)

I'd never agree. What happens if I need more than 15 minutes? Will I be deemed a bad student because I simply need more time to do my business? What does this have to do with how I learn?

How about you can use the bathroom when you need to, and if you actually find instances of students not using the bathroom, cutting class, etc. you address it by punishing those students. Give them detention. Make them have a chaperone at random times. Suspend them. Punish the behavior you want to regulate (lying about using the bathroom to goof off) and don't try to regulate unrelated and uncontrollable bodily functions.

I don't disagree but the reason schools are turning to alternatives is because schools can't afford the labor to do those things.

good point. lets get some bids on the "shit tracking app", pay for a seat for every student and then make sure we further stretch the teachers by giving them a special admin seat in said "shit tracking app" and making sure they punish over-shitters

Students also have trouble using the restroom when the facilities are inoperable due to vandalism. There's not really a good solution. What is necessary is more staffing, but there is not enough labor available at the rates school districts are able to pay.

> I don't disagree but the reason schools are turning to alternatives is because schools can't afford the labor to do those things.

Hall monitors did this for generations.

That would be the labor I'm referring to.

The majority of US schools report struggling to hire paraprofessionals.

https://www.edweek.org/leadership/how-bad-are-school-staffin...

>> Hall monitors did this for generations.

> That would be the labor I'm referring to.

The generations of hall monitors were students. They're free.

If the students goofing off in the hall are willing to listen to the nerds who are hall monitors, then that school doesn't really have too much of an issue with delinquent students in the halls.

Do you really think other students are best equipped to deal with students having sex, doing drugs, or devious licks in the bathrooms?

And in any case, the hall monitors are probably better off in class instead of being unpaid labor.

Those mostly seem like imagined problems. They're trivially addressed - as evidenced by having hall monitors confidently deployed from one generation of school administration to the next.

Given the way schools districts are drawn in the US, it highly depends on the locale. Pick any random school in Loudoun County VA and the halls will probably look quite a bit different than some random school in Mobile County AL.

Is there really no way to incentivize compliance for the difficult few without invasive surveillance of the masses?

Dumb parallel: Some people litter or jaywalk! We could probably address this by implanting GPS trackers in everybody, but... should we?

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