72% of U.S. high school teachers say cellphone distraction is a major problem
pewresearch.org
pewresearch.org
On a related tangent, my drive to work takes me past multiple middle-school bus-stops and every. single. kid. Has their face glued to their phone every. single. day. It’s depressing.
Maybe for you. Sincerely, Meta, Apple, Microsoft and Google. /s
And that makes 100% ;)
Not sure why HN acts like this kind of rule is impossible when its already extremely common in schools.
10 years ago you were messaging/posting; now it’s all video streams with hidden wireless headphones.
I feel like taking a phone until the end of school year might have impact, that used to be a policy when I was kid, but granted kids weren’t walking around with $1000 doodads so different economics.
The 30% who say it’s not a problem just assume the kids on their phones are a lost cause and just write them off.
20+ years ago, you had a cell phone, maybe, for messages during the day, and that's it. Outside of some simple phone games, most had no internet access, and you weren't constantly in a group chat with people in class discussing how boring it was or something else, so how often it took your focus even if you were subverting the rules was much more limited.
Now, I have my phone in my pocket all the time, and a reputation of being difficult to reach because I often have it on silent to not interrupt my life, when apps randomly find new excuses to pop up notifications midday that have no urgency to them, and businesses expect you to not be bothered if they text you at a random time.
But most people are just on them, all the time, child and adult, so applying a new rule to that will prove challenging, because the group perception is that's unreasonable to do, and people will fight back hard on it, both for that reason and because it's an addictive serotonin drip in your pocket that a lot of people have no practice with delaying the gratification of, any more.
(e: This isn't to say we shouldn't do it, to be clear, but that's why, I think, it will be a hard sell, and because people don't immediately see the value of it, they will probably keep doing things like burner phones, and at least in the US, I think explicit cell phone jamming on your campus is a violation of rules, so limiting how much people can get away with having a secret phone for midday online access is also tricky.)
I mean, the fundamental idea behind a school, where fundamental rights of students are taken away (their speech is heavily curtailed, their freedom of movement is heavily curtailed, etc.) is that kids under a certain age do not have the maturity and knowledge to make many decisions and that’s what the schools exist to provide them with.
I personally feel we, as in western society, have put too much emphasis on how they feel and not enough on doing the hard things that are best for them. We have seriously failed our children I fear.
Did we all forget about books?
If I live my regular professional life using stackoverflow, man pages , Wikipedia, Google Scholar, etc. then I become very proficient using those. It doesn't make any sense forcing students to learn research methods they aren't going to use outside the classroom at least not at the expense of prohibiting the de-facto, gold standard of information sharing i.e the internet.
Saying you can learn without a phone/internet is like saying you can travel via horse or find a job via the classified section. Efficient research and learning is a network dependent skill; if other people use X then you need to know X not Y .
You often can't seize the device. If the student says no you risk physical escalation. Students are VERY protective of their phone due to the personal content on devices.
You often can't suspend or academically punish the student. There are VERY strong incentives in public school systems not to further bury an underperforming student, minority students, and similar criteria. The student may WANT to be suspended.
Students can easily hide the device, like in their underwear, purse, whatever. Again unless you want prison-level strip searches there really isn't a way around this.
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Honestly I think we'd need state/regulatory/infrastructure level tools to enact a ban policy. Think signal-jammers, vpns on legitimate devices, etc. It would be a massive IT cost to enact. IMO it would be worth it, but I don't think society would bare the cost because too few care about education beyond its function as childcare - we have a entire political party that wants to disband the Department of Education.
We shouldn’t waste a massive amount of effort on people that don’t want help.
Lots of schools ban cellphone use, but students find lots of ways to abuse this rule.
Indeed, when you start to collect phones at the start of class, you find a pretty big share now have burner phones to turn in, so they can still sneak peaks at their phone or take it to the restroom.
on that note why the shit are students permitted to leave the testing area during critical exams (midterms, finals) , ostensibly to use the restroom.
but with phone in pocket, obviously more than a few are googling test answers as well? I've personally witnessed this multiple times over past few years and it makes no sense.
If you meant to say that we can prevent phones from also entering said restroom, then that sounds great. I have my doubts that it’s possible, but I’m fine with that solution in general.
Of course it’s even easier for the parents to just not give your kid a phone
Forty years ago I bet you could get "passing notes distraction" is a major problem. There was a whole generation that could text one handed in their pockets and they turned out fine. They're adults with real jobs now.
re: but smartphones are different, in this essay...
And #1 or #2 are directly tied to cellphones, too: not to say that reducing cellphone use will eliminate them, but it will certainly help.
And I expect other dividends from reducing cellphone use: the students who are addicted to short-form content have shockingly small attention spans.
Sure, I'd like to be paid more, and I'd like easier interactions with parents. Or to live in a culture that prioritized education a bit more.
With that out of the way...
Carrot or stick. School is already all stick all the time. Right now, some students feel that some of their time is better spent on their phones than paying attention to the teacher. Why that is doesn't seem to be a significant part of the conversation.
Properly fund public, free for everyone education. Pay teachers more. Make school good for kids instead of trying to force kids to be good for school.
And kids feel that eating donuts is better than vegetables.
Or that drinking soda is better than water.
The fact that students feel something easy (not just easy, but something that is designed by tens of thousands of the smartest people in the world to be addictive) is more attractive than something hard says almost nothing that isn't a tautology.
Simple solution, no?