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.
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.
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.
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.
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™).
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.