Teacher Did All He Could to Keep Kids Off Phones. He's Quitting in Frustration | Hacker News Reader

Teacher Did All He Could to Keep Kids Off Phones. He's Quitting in Frustration

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26 pointslxm43 comments

I’m still very confused why this has become such a thing recently. I was in senior year a decade ago and we had iPhones back then too. iPods and tamagotchis too. If the teacher needed to deal with a student on their phone rather than working, they’d confiscate it. Most of us left them in our pockets, and seem to have graduated just fine.

Why have kids seemingly become unable to leave their phones silently in their pockets, and why have teachers seemingly become unable to confiscate them when needed? Is social media these days that addicting? Are teachers exposed to consequences for managing their classrooms?

Anyway, as a student I would have been reluctant to leave my phone at home when I’d demonstrated my ability to not fiddle with it in class, so for many ‘normal’ students I can see why they’d push back.

Read this as a general feeling of someone in 40s without kids and consume news from multiple countries.

This things happened gradually. At your days the smart phone is still at its infancy where social media are probably text based and at most image based. Nowadays, the social media are a mix of text and videos and probably the quantity of short video the youth consume are far more than the text consume. The phone itself also becoming the extension of our brain (not only youth). And this brings two consequences.

- Many feels that there's no need to learn the basic. The wisdom they had, together with the reasoning given by the tools are enough. - The youth also prefer shorter content than long form content. They don't even have the patience to sit through a 30 minute youtube video and prefer a whole story unfolded in a few minutes that fit in tiktok, youtube short or similar.

Combining these two means that a lot of the students in this generation will not have the patience to go through a 40 min - 1 hr classroom section/lecture.

Also as other have commented in a different thread, the parents of this generation simply does not side with the teacher, and this happens in many countries as well.

The shorter attention span idea is an interesting perspective on this. I’d have thought fidget toys like electronic pets etc. might have the same effect of inducing attention diverting behaviours but as you said, my experience of Facebook/Snapchat at the time was mostly static images. There was video on Facebook and to be fair we watched a lot thanks to many Australian phone plans zero rating data for Facebook but we didn’t do that during class.

I still think of myself as a ‘digital native’, as in this technology has existed my whole life, but in many ways yeah I agree with your perspective that it was not as pervasive during my formative years and I guess that makes all the difference here.

Growing up with this stuff in it's infancy, it was like there were two worlds, the digital one and the real one. Most people out in the real world didn't use the internet much and even if you spent tons of time online, they could pull you up to speed with their ways of thinking and behaving. Kids nowadays don't have that, their parents are phone addicts, their neighbors are phone addicts. They can't see themselves out of the maze because there is no one to guide them out.

> This things happened gradually.

And is happening continuously over time. It is the deleterious effects of this accretion that is so insidious about the digital/social/internet media.

I have experienced/am experiencing this same problem in my own mental functioning in spite being "old" (am in the middle 50s), don't use phones much, don't do social media much and yet with just browsing and consuming all types of content on the Internet; my attention span, focusing ability, time spent on continuous concentrated study all have declined (well beyond what can be attributed to ageing). Add now a sedentary lifestyle entailed by the above activities and you have your physical body deteriorating in all parameters too. This sets up a vicious cycle where the mind degrades the body which in turn degrades the mind and so on.

Thankfully since i have memories of my mental functioning from before the Internet era i can discipline myself when needed (but getting harder) but i shudder to think what it is doing to the developing and growing brains/minds of kids/teens growing up in this environment.

It is really important that Society as a whole wakes up to this insidious problem and involves Neuroscientists/Biologists/Psychologists/Scientists and Political Policy makers to focus on and find a solution to this epidemic.

Teachers are no longer respected in their decisions by parents. Before, a teacher could take away a phone and the criticism came at the student for not paying attention. Now the teacher comes under criticism in protection of the student.

The whole culture around teaching needs a hard reset.

A hard reset back to the days when teachers could get away with anything and their word was believed over that of students?

eg: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-05-27/historical-abuse-alle...

Perhaps not.

That was a hell of a leap, and we both know that has absolutely nothing to do with what was being suggested by the person to whom you replied.

Hardly.

Sufficiently large schools will have at least one staff member doing something inappropriate with at least one student, there are literal Royal Commisions on that kind of thing.

Particular specific institutes of the past have gone further with large numbers of the staff abusing large numbers of the students.

There's a middle ground between always deferring to teachers as absolute authorities and not.

No, the parent poster was right: teachers are absolute authorities in matters of discipline on school grounds. Parents have a duty to support school discipline, and this is completely orthogonal to your point.

Nobody is advocating abuse. That is a major leap away from my point.

Taking a child's phone away is not abuse. It should be expected and desired by parents wanting their child to actually learn in school. Unfortunately we have normalized suspicion towards teachers to such a toxic level that they are now powerless to enforce a learning environment, and it has resulted in a mass exodus of talented people from teaching.

> Why have kids seemingly become unable to leave their phones silently in their pockets,

Social media.

Why have adults seemingly become unable to leave their phones silently in their pockets?

A fair question. I see men my age (pushing 70) looking at their phones as they walk their dogs, and adults who are at least approaching middle age doing the same as they walk their dogs, push strollers and so on.

> Why have adults seemingly become unable to leave their phones silently in their pockets?

Social media.

> and why have teachers seemingly become unable to confiscate them when needed?

Parents threatened, possibly assaulted, teachers over this just yesterday in my area: https://www.l1nieuws.nl/nieuws/2661710/grescollege-in-reuver...

Thousands of six figure engineers are directed by Wall Street to develop systems to help prevent people from putting down their devices.

The kids never had a chance.

I'm in school and all my classmates complain that they have to study in their free time. Despite apparently studying even at night, most have worse grades than me. I don't study outside school time, instead I actually pay attention in class and have my phone in my bag. I don't understand my generation.

Ignoring all the psychologists and engineers being paid 6 figure salary to siphon your peers attention to sell ads, I wouldn't be surprised if your peers had several undiagnosed and easily accommodated attention disorders their parents don't believe in.

I imagine they don't study at all however devote very large blocks of time to studying which they spend mostly distracting themselves and never working. I go to cafes every day. It has been a long time since I've seen a study group of youth doing work. They are mostly talking or distracting themselves. Even when they stop talking and appear to work, eventually they pick up talking again and you can tell they've been looming over the conversation topics in their heads the entire time.

They simply don't think studying or learning is cool and are more interested in gossip.

> don't think studying or learning is cool and are more interested in gossip

I mean, at a certain level, that's just being a teenager. Most never cared that much about grades or studying.

A group of us that had all played football together in high school got together a few years ago when two of our number died - one was expected (he had long been in ill health), the other murdered in very strange circumstances. Anyway, we're all sitting around telling stories, and I mentioned a few things some of the more academic among us had done. One of the others, who was a pretty average student, said, "man, I always figured you guys in the honors classes just studied and such, sounds like I missed out on some damn funny stories."

Thing was that I almost never did homework or studied at home - I used my downtime during the school day to get that done so I could play Civilization when I got home.

I am so surprised that many parents are supportive of their kids having phones in school with the sole reason being communication in case of an emergency.

How do we expect kids to pay attention or be productive with a smartphone in their pocket? We are setting them up for failure - and by us I mean parents and school administrators who support kids having phones in class. Teachers are not in a position to change this.

I don't understand the problem. Of course kids should have their phones at school! But that doesn't mean that they should be allowed to use them during class.

If kids are using their phone during class then you either confiscate the phone or kick the student out of the class. If they do it during a test you mark them down as cheating and fail them.

>How do we expect kids to pay attention or be productive with a smartphone in their pocket?

I think this is setting them up for the future, because in the future they are going to have a smartphone in their pocket at all times. They're going to have to learn to handle that eventually.

But in the pocket doesn't mean in hand.

Outside of class time though? It's nobody else's business what they do.

In the future those kids are also going to have the ability to buy alcohol, tobacco, junk food, weapons, motorcycles, fireworks, etc.

It's looking more and more like we should be putting phones into a similar category. Children should likely be more protected against the harms of phones until they have developed more to have a greater ability to use them safely.

>alcohol, tobacco, junk food, weapons, motorcycles, fireworks, etc.

All of these, except junk food, are banned in some place or another by power-tripping governments. Although they are working on the junk food part. Is the implication to get phones banned altogether?

>Children should likely be more protected against the harms of phones until they have developed more to have a greater ability to use them safely.

It's funny that nobody seems to be able to point out what this unsafe thing is that they're being protected from. All you get are social science studies during the replication crisis in one of the sloppiest sciences we have and it's protected by moralizing. I don't see anything concrete in the harm that people are talking about that rivals things like traffic accidents (kids play outside more = more victims of traffic), general injuries (swimming, falls etc) etc.

This all just sounds like the old "don't sit too close to the TV, it will ruin your eyes" or "d&d is satanic" that we were scared with as kids.

In the US anyway, there’s a term called “helicopter” parents. Way too involved with their kids, to put it mildly.

A lot of them are simply taking issues out on the teachers. Like how people take issues out on the road.

>surprised that many parents are supportive of their kids having phones in school

I had a former roommate who laughed explaining how she prevented the public school from taking her son's phone away by making it be the interface for his glucose monitor (thus requiring that he be allowed to carry all day in school).

More sickly, she encouraged this so her son could coordinate her pot deals at a moment's notice (Mother of the Year™).

I want my kid to have a phone at school AND not be allowed to use it during class.

It seems an impossible task for teachers to stop 30 kids from using their phones.

But they give assignments that require their phone (eg, watch a video, make a recording).

I think we need to go back to pen and paper only.

The school provided equipment is horrible too- slow, buggy, full of spyware.

When I was in school phones would have been confiscated and it would take a parent to get it back.

Ban smart phones for everyone under the age of atleast 16, but ideally under 18. I would be in support of using tax payer money to provide each public school kid with a dumb phone that can only be used to make basic calls and text messaging. That’s all you’re allowed to have in the classroom.

inb4 “it’s going to be used for mass surveillance” - it doesn’t matter.

Why do they even need that in the classroom?

To appease parents who insist there's a safety violation going on because their kids can't call them if there's an emergency.

What safety violation would be possible, inside the classroom? Fights in the hall, ok, but they could keep the phone on their backpack. But inside the classroom with the teacher present?

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/careersandeducation/a-teache...

Don’t some teachers have a phone pouch board they use to take attendance? Phone in pouch you’re here. Phone missing you’re marked absent.

I genuinely believe that if we want kids to have some normalcy here we need to flat out ban smartphone for kids up to say 16-18 years old and instead dumb phones should be the norm instead.

Because it's not just social media, it's the entire 24/7 jumping around different apps all the time that is screwing them up.

Before kids would get bored playing video games and then instead wanting to go out and play.

Now it's going from one app to another once they are bored.

I think most people would agree, but problem is enforcement. I worked 20 years in a low SES school where education was less valued. What do you do when you try to take the phone and they refuse? Suspend them? Sure. Then they come back and do it again. Then the state does an analysis and you have to explain that there is a significant number of students missing school because of a phone? They talk to you like it's ridiculous. Kids need to be in school. If you can solve the "what to do if they don't put it away" problem you'd be a hero in education.

A simple fine to the parents should be sufficient.

And if they don't pay?

Do these kids just not have parents? Are teachers unable to get parents to require their kids leave their phones at home? When I was in high school we had Nokia phones that did basically nothing but calls and snake.

Parents (many uninvolved, many demanding and unrealistic) and administrators (kowtowing to parents) grind teachers down until they leave.

I recommend no one be a teacher in the US. It’s mostly daycare for those who can’t homeschool or private school, for whatever reason.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40053774

(Search “parents” in r/teachers on Reddit for more, being a teacher in the US is a shit show; I have helped more than one teacher switch careers to save them from public education)

For all the rhetoric about saving our children, the best for the children, etc, it comes to putting it into action, we do the opposite: no respect, low compensation, sending kids to school without any manners or respect towards the teachers.

Administrators are no better. They change policies year to year, more paperwork, more training needed, more rules. A lot of them have never been a teacher even.

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