Greenwich schools to ban most cellphones, Apple Watches, Fitbits and more
greenwichtime.com
greenwichtime.com
Making no phones a blanket policy in all schools should be an absolute no-brainer.
Im sure there is some happy medium solution here, like putting your phone in a basket or cubby or something like that, at the very least. But I think this is something that has to be seriously addressed and considered. Phones are obviously bad for all of us, more so for children whose minds are far more elastic and far more prone to social alienation. The endless stream of notifications is almost at a gambling / casino level. I think you have to address the root cause of that as well
How does that stuff help when the kid isn't actually at school, but is between home and school somewhere? If the kid can't bring the phone to school at all, then that means the kid can't have the phone on the way to school either. Allowing the kids to bring phones but lock them up during school hours would solve this problem though.
Also, this is US-specific, but what if there's a school shooting? You don't want someone's kid to be able to call their parents and say some last words to them before they're brutally shot, while the entire town's police force is simply standing outside and preventing anyone from entering?
Yes, parents have been called by students during incident but that generally makes situation worse as parents run to the school causing delays for first responders.
Wasn't the problem with Uvalde that a bajillion police piled up outside the school and then never actually pushed forward?
Fucking dictatorship we are in. Let people use technology, especially in an emergency.
Do you have an example?
Every case I recall involved kids calling their parents who only got mentioned because they got in first responders’ way.
And teachers will still carry phones, which they can hand to any kid during an incident if they need to focus on corralling students.
This decentralization is imo more resilient to a school shooter scenario than a centralized cubby system.
I’ll wait for specific sources, but that just doesn’t make any sense.
Seriously this is such a weird comment. You don't want to say "school shooting" at risk of being uncivil but you think kids should always be prepared for a live gunman to walk into their lives. From my perspective, that's the uncivil part of your comment.
When did schools start allowing cell phone use during class? Do teachers no longer have the power to confiscate devices that are used at inappropriate times?
And then there are kahoots, which makes learning a game (you don't need effort!) and exercises are automatically corrected (so teachers don't need effort either).
There is no way to escape tech in some places.
I see youngsters now that have hundreds of messages a day, on many platforms, and consequently hours of screen time a day. Does it not feel like this time would be better spends in face to face engagements?
I read about girls that are just tired, they have a good time, everybody gossips on Social Media, they have to maintain "status" there, streaks, presence, likes, it never ends, last thing before sleep, first thing after waking up. It sounds so exhausting.
We had the same distractions before smart phones. We would just hide in the computer lab and browse the Internet while playing games and trying to look busy. A hundred messages sounds like about a half hour of conversation on any chat platform.
We would still play games on our calculators, sign in to IRC, and post on forums. Now it's cell phone games, discord, and twitter but really it's the same shit.
The idea behind banning cell phones is more about attention span and the unfortunate reality of constant dopamine hits.
I do think (hope?) the temporary removal of dopamine hits works in the long run. If I'm regularly not near my phone to check on whatever, the impulse to grab my phone is removed, because I'm engrossed in other things. Do that often enough and it may just wean people off of this online crack.
It wasn’t anything like you describe at all. For better or worse people did actually talk to each other.
And while we did call each other on the phone reasonably often, generally when you weren’t in the room with someone you weren’t communicating with them at all.
If you really needed to use it, you had time between periods and during lunch.
The people campaigning about this are concerned about that too.
I wonder to what extent this is an effect of the age of the teachers themselves. The median age of a teacher in the US is ~40 years old, so a significant proportion of them are accustomed to phones being an essential part of social life and hence may be a bit more lenient to students occasionally checking their phone when it appears to be non-disruptive. Needless to say though, this easily becomes a non-fallacious slippery slope.
Many parents freak out if you take their kid's phone. That's not okay anymore, I guess. Detention doesn't really exist either because parents don't want it. Even summer school is just a suggestion at this point. Parents have bullied their local ISD's into being weak.
For kids? How ever did anyone survive before 1990.
For better or worse, the world is both more of the same and very different from what it used to be. Direct comparisons are not really useful, and quips like "how did people drive without a gas gauge / survive without seatbelts" are missing a ton of context.
I really, really hate this mindless, lazy line of argument in general. It gets tossed out with absolutely everything, from the internet to vaccines to modern farming. The simple answer in many cases to "how did anyone survive before X" is "well, often they didn't". Life expectancies were in fact lower in the past. More people died, or were maimed, with no hope of treatment. Or sometimes it's "they did, but much less efficiently and we come to depend on each growth of the economy which at the foundation is literally about being able to do things more efficiently". Ease of communication, knowing what the weather is, all sorts of things mean less wasteful use of time and energy. Sometimes "they did, but perhaps less happily". A loved relative was in and accident, went to the hospital and you never got the chance to be involved when it mattered. And of course in some cases it's "new things have created downsides that create a need for other new things, the world has changed". Sometimes we can do something about that in the near term. Sometimes we cannot.
Low effort responses like you made are discouraged on HN for good reason. Yeah, absolutely new negatives have come with the new positives and seeking to reduce the former matters. But productive discussion and activity tends to focus on specifics vs generalities. Reducing the benefits of real time communication devices to a binary "life/death" and then NOT grappling with modern trends in everything from natural disasters to school shootings to reduced bussing doesn't strike me as great Walter.
It's zero in my case.
Then look at the downsides, which are pervasive - inattention, disruption, distraction.
If you still want it, put a landline phone in each classroom on the teacher's desk. The principal can also have a switch to turn it off in an emergency.
Yeah, there were no school shootings in my state in the 90s either. But since Columbine objective fact is there have been over 400 affecting almost 400k students [0], and the trend doesn't seem to be going down. Events like sudden wildfires going out of control in a real hurry are now also radically different then even 20 years ago. And yes, some of the scheduling and health features watches offer would have been very helpful to me in school thanks. The communication features of watches are pleasantly minimal and also almost necessarily public. They only work well 2-way with voice, which is not something one can do silently by definition and thus highly policeable in class. The information consumption capability is highly minimal. Watches also do not have cameras with all the associated issues. And it'd be possible to take the communication restrictions further with cellular restrictions in school and forcing everything through the school's firewall.
>Then look at the downsides, which are pervasive - inattention, disruption, distraction.
Out of genuine curiosity: can you show me some good studies on this with respect to watches, not phones? On the smart phone side yes, I've absolutely both seen studies and personally experienced the addictive and distracting aspects. But I have not seen anything like that with watches, and my personal experience is also that it's completely different in usage.
I stand by my assertion: you threw out a form of argument that is lazy, shallow, and constantly misapplied. Even if in this specific case the balance of factors weighs against any smart devices at all (which I both extremely doubt and think will become extremely problematic for other reasons longer term), the form of argument "how did anyone survive before X" is so regularly bad faith, aggressively stupid, or both that it coming out instantly makes me more not less suspicious of whichever side the person stating it is supporting.
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0: https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/interactive/school-...
Yes, school shootings are a problem. But why does there need to be 30 cell phones in the classroom? The landline on the teacher's desk can be enough. Or even a button to turn off the jammer.
For wildfire, call the principal who then hits the fire button. We had tornado drills in elementary school. No phones were required, it was a siren mounted on a pole. It worked fine.
Who needs 1000 phones in the school?
A single landline isn't going to help 30 kids call their parents and say a final good-bye before the shooter kills them, while the town police force stands outside.
When people say "no phones in class" they don't mean kid's can't have phones. They mean they can't use their phone in class.
I think, probably, this rule does NOT apply during an active shooter. That's my guess. I would imagine the teacher isn't going to start enforcing that rule while under lockdown. What do you think?
I’ve had this scenario in training at work before deploying to certain global locations (Afghanistan, Gaza, Somalia etc)
That it even crosses your mind suggests that the US is a country broken beyond repair.
This is literally one and the same technology. Just a hardware client for some pre-defined social networks.
you'll trade for a near-guarantee that your kid will have some social anxiety or attention issues...but if you really want to make sure they have a phone available in the low-probability event of a school shooting, this is the tradeoff you will make
Speaking of bulletproof vests, wouldn't ensuring that Junior is wearing one be way more useful than a cellphone for seeing him home alive?
I would recommend rethinking the assertion that most kids in schools are going to die without a cellphone.
Given that life expectancy increases have been coming at a snail's pace, and on occasion reversing, I suspect if one normalized for these sort of non-medical shifts in society, we'd see that life expectancy is most likely decreasing, likely due to things like widespread obesity, mental illness, and other ailments which modern gadgets are significantly contributing to.
Now the tiktok client successfully competes with teacher for kids' attention and some dumbheads are shouting - "Look, the tiktok client still can phone police/firefighters/parents! What else are you going to prohibit, maybe a paper?"
The rest is just useless fluff.
Note that Caltech was exactly that. A prof, a chalkboard, a lecture hall. I learned more in 2 weeks with that than a year of high school. I've suggested to college students that they'll learn better if they leave their laptops in the dorm. And I say this as a computer professional.
Having many of these materials in a digital format on a smart device can help a lot in terms of cost and availability. It's not critical, and I very much understand the downsides of having an always-connected device that kids are used to play with, but it's also not at all 0 cost to go entirely to paper.
I'm sure your time in math classes at Caltech that were only chalkboard and notes was extremely productive. But some lectures require more materials (you can't have a good lecture on Alexander's conquests without a map of what he actually conquered), and a full education requires much more than lectures. You're not going to be a good EE student if you can't model a circuit in Spice or draw one in some *CAD.
No, not really. At Caltech, about half had a textbook, but the textbook was not referred to during lecture, and what was taught tended to diverge from the textbook.
> maps
The prof would freehand the salient aspects of a map and any other drawings required.
> literature
I never took any literature classes, as I saw no value in them. Even so, I cannot see the utility of a textbook during class.
> You're not going to be a good EE student if you can't model a circuit in Spice or draw one in some *CAD.
I had to laugh. None of that was available in the 70s.
I drew circuits freehand on paper. OMG. There were labs available for students building circuits, where the rubber really met the road.
I was not majoring in EE, I just enjoyed the classes. But the EEs Caltech turned out were all first class engineers. Taught by lectures with a blackboard and chalk.
Quantum physics was taught the same way. Not even a textbook.
The engineering work I did on the 757 was pen and paper, with a calculator as a crutch.
The most damning evidence against all these materials is that there is zero evidence of any improvement in K-12 results in the last 50 years, and things just seem to be getting worse.
> you need teaching manuals for every subject
Only for teachers who don't know the material.
It's not, though. But I'd wager that 99.9% of cellphone use during class is.
No, what Walter wrote what what he wanted to say. However, since you agree with the conclusion, you will defend the argument even if it is not too good.
I know, I know, this is sarcasm, but where is the argument? If anything, it is a textbook example of the "appeal to tradition" fallacy. There are many good arguments against smartphones in classrooms, that one isn't. For the details, see xoa's answer.
My first cellphone was in 1994 or so. It took many years before I was acclimated to using it, and didn't get an internet phone until 2015.
I was a very early adopter of computers, but pretty late with phones.
Maybe mentally append a '/s' to the comment you replied to.
I built an intercom from a kit when older, but it was useless as yelling worked better.
Fitbits let you “see calls, texts & smartphone app notifications on your wrist when your phone is nearby” [1]. It has all the attention, focus and de-socialisation problems of a smartphone.
[1] https://www.fitbit.com/global/us/products/smartwatches/sense...
I was early with smartphones because I thought they'd essentially be PDAs with a modem ("They're just working out the kinks.") Smartphones have to be the most disappointing thing that's happened to consumer computing.
It's kind of funny that with pervasive networking I miss having to be mindful and sync everything I wanted to take with me.
https://ewritable.com/best-e-ink-tablets/#Best_Dedicated_Not...
I don't let my kids use a smart phone for entertainment. They use it sometimes for chatGPT and Google translate especially when they study but not beyond that and I intend to keep it that way till they're old enough (17 or so).
I'm sure you can get an exception for a glucose monitor if you have diabetes.
I think banning fitness trackers is a bit much, they are very useful for sports such as cycling, running, tri & swimming.
[1] https://www.education.govt.nz/school/digital-technology/cell...
Fitbits let you “see calls, texts & smartphone app notifications on your wrist when your phone is nearby” [1].
Unless you’re doing a full backpack and pocket search, permitting Fitbits seems like a guaranteed loophole.
[1] https://www.fitbit.com/global/us/products/smartwatches/sense...
The ban seems to target children too young to need to keep track of things like that, as far as I understand the article.
The school taking the step to ban the devices fixes it.
Rich and FAANG parents tend to be better at restricting their kids’ phone and tablet use. Far from universal. But take this article—Greenwich is a rich town.
Limited anecdata, of course, but it makes sense that they’re aware of the dangers (they’re building them, know people are, or at least understand them) better than the median civilian.
Secret: very limited phone and tablet time. Like how life was for millennia before smartphones.
Obviously parenting becomes easier with screens around. But being a parent is not about choosing the easiest path for yourself.
Sorry. I was using eye contact as an indicator of involvement, focus and a general ability to engage in conversation. I didn’t mean to suggest it’s bad per se.
I have colleagues on the spectrum. They don’t tend to maintain eye contact when they speak. But their conversation is deeply engaging. The cell phone kids, on the other hand, have a specific vacant gaze that, once you see it, almost gives an “is anybody home” vibe. Their sentences are short and abrupt, diction well below where it should be at their age. (And these aren’t stupid kids. They’re just bad at interacting off screen.)
At the same time, children are targeted to be constantly "on" and "engaged", and we seem to be OK with that.
its truly amazing and i hope to keep it this way forever. meanwhile the rest of his class mates have smartphones and stare at it from the moment they leave their home ... and i assume till it runs out of battery. they dont even watch where they're going.
But aren’t kids already banned from many places they congregate. WhatsApp, Fortnite, etc.
A ban only works if
1) significant numbers support it
2) the ban is enforced
And neither of those are likely outside of school, and in my experience are unlikely in school.
I believe banning kids from using smart phones is much more enforceable than individual bans on particular sites
Yet learning how to load roms on it, the firmware, the command line. My poor mother didn't know what to do with me - I was constantly late, skipping school, in detention, hanging out with burn outs. My siblings didn't do that stuff until college.
And now I'm wealthy and the most successful graduate of a 700 person class! Food for thought for the parents of "burn out" tech addicted youths...
In a parallel universe, where computers didn't take off and become important, we'd have run-of-the-mill jobs today, and our fascination with firmware and the command line would be mere nostalgic childhood memories.
Maybe two decades ago, there was an article going around about a person who became a commercial pilot thanks to World of Warcraft (WoW improved his English through raids). That doesn't really mean that playing WoW is a good way to become a pilot though.
I suspect that in your case, even without the Gameboy, you'd end up where you are now.
But what if device manufacturers worked with schools to implement some kind of “School Mode” on these devices? Students could retain their access in exchange for schools setting policies on what’s allowed, e.g. you can keep wearing your watch, but it’s effectively in collection-only mode during the school day. Nothing intrusive to the students; more like Apple’s “Focus” modes but mandatory on school property.
I can also imagine all kinds of technical issues with this, but as our devices become increasingly wearable and integrated with daily life, it seems like a ban is only a temporarily viable solution, even if it’s the right option at this moment.
How would you enforce this?
> as our devices become increasingly wearable and integrated with daily life, it seems like a ban is only a temporarily viable solution
I’m a strong proponent of these technologies. But the truth is we mandate, and as a result do, zero testing on how it affects kids before deploying them. For the consumer market, test after selling makes sense. For kids, European-style whitelisting might be better.
We are trending towards a world where kids of the poor and middle class are addicted to screens. That’s a horrifying class divide.
A device that has been so enrolled would detect when it is at school, maybe by looking for a particular Bluetooth beacon that the school deploys. When the device determines that it is at school, it would connect to the school's wifi network authenticated and secured with a certificate generated for the device when it was enrolled. It could then use a provisioning server on that network to find out what usage is allowed or not allowed while at school.
Such a system could allow for pretty fine grained control. For example the article mentions that one thing kids use their phones for is taking photos of notes on the board. With a School Mode that works as describe above they could make it so the teacher can use their phone or tablet near the end of class to grant temporary camera permission to all the enrolled phones in that classroom.
The simplest option would be a geofence on school grounds, but I realize this comes with issues and kids will figure out how to bypass it.
Another approach is to have some kind of scan-in/scan-out system where you’re allowed to maintain physical access by scanning some device upon entering the school which has been programmed to safely enable the mode without requiring intrusive access to the device itself. It’d unlock upon scanning out for the day or by a parent. This would require deep integration by Apple/Google/etc. similar to Apple’s work on digital driver’s licenses.
I describe a beacon-based approach in a sibling reply.
I think a feature set like this would need to be fairly dumb in that it should not require positive identification of individuals and should instead be focused on a fairly simple binary “you scanned into a limited area” type of decision.
I don’t know how I feel about these options or even the whole approach, but I’m bringing them up mostly as a way to explore the concept.
It doesn't really need to be enforced. The problem is when kids are using their device in a way that the school considers inappropriate (because of distraction, etc...). "School mode" is supposed to help kids stay in focus. If the school notices a kid is using his device inappropriately (ex: responding to social media notifications), then the school can say "why wasn't that phone in school mode? it wouldn't have happened if it was" and take disciplinary action.
A kid that is able to stay attentive and resist the barrage of notifications and all the addictive things smartphones are known for without help from "school mode" would show an impressive level of self-control and should be praised, not punished because he didn't press the right button.
I get the impression that the logic you are following here could be more accurately described as "we should never ban any tech ever for anyone because it MIGHT in the future became important for most people's daily lives...assuming we didn't ban it". It seems like a circular argument to me and doesn't make any argument whatsoever about whether or not said devices SHOULD become part of children's (and adults) daily lives.
This is a forward looking statement. The point is that the integration of wearables is just beginning. Banning them might work for now, but assuming the integration continues and increases, banning them might not be viable in the future.
Imagine a scenario where an Apple Watch is also monitoring blood glucose. Or where someone's prescription eyeglasses are also connected to the Internet. These are things that are already happening today, but haven't yet permeated society.
Another 10, 20, 30 years of progress will bring new issues and consumer expectations that may make bans less viable. The point of all of this is to think about potential ways to navigate such a future.
How could a teacher check that school mode is on without gaining control of the device? How could they ensure that the mode isn't turned off when they aren't looking?
Another approach would be beacon-based, where the devices would operate with limited capability if in range of an actively broadcasting cryptographically secure “At School” beacon.
I think there are plenty of ways to do this without surveillance or any specific knowledge about individuals using the phones, but it would require collaboration between schools and device manufacturers, and would understandably raise questions about whether disabling devices in this way is a slippery slope to other things.
Although I wouldn’t be too mad if this was generalized to concerts and movie theaters. Finding the balance between policy enforcement and safety would be the top issue.
Older devices, jailbroken iPhones, rooted Androids or just straight up Chinese knock-offs would be a lot more desirable in such a world, and Tiktok would make sure that the smart kids knew how to break their devices themselves. The not-so-smart ones would inevitably have smarter buddies willing to do them a favor in exchange for a few bucks.
You'd also have to be extra careful to prevent misconfigured beacons and overzealous school administrators from interfering with the phones of neighbors, staff, those who have an exception, or even random passers by.
This is by definition invasive; having the device maker or OS maker integrate it makes it more invasive, not less.
Apple's work on driver's licenses comes to mind. The deep integration is exactly what allows such a feature to not be invasive. Limits on what "School Mode" can actually do and the actual implementation approach will determine whether or not such a feature is invasive.
It certainly could be implemented in an invasive way. But being invasive is not intrinsic to such a solution.
And keep in mind the alternative is an outright ban, which in terms of absolute outcomes is far more "invasive" to individual carrying devices if you're using a definition of the word that covers "limits access to your device when on school premises".
If the TSA seizes my (still-encrypted-and-locked) device, that's obnoxious and wrong, but not invasive. If they try to get me to unlock it so they can see what's on it, that's invasive (and will get a "no", followed by them deciding if they want to escalate to seizing it or not).
And if there are exceptions, you can put anyone on the exception list (because it's just a list) and it makes the change as useless as any other feature.
Parents already have parental modes on phones and they're not using them to this degree, it would seem.
I realize that parents have become reliant on constant contact and never being out of touch, but this is a whole other conversation to have about whether or not that is actually of benefit to anyone involved.
Plenty of reasons to believe it's a net-harm.
> Parents already have parental modes on phones and they're not using them to this degree, it would seem.
This is a good point, and I think one path forward would be to require parents to implement these modes. The solution to phones in schools can't just be policy - parents need to parent. Perhaps they'd be more likely to use those features if the alternative is an outright ban.
I wish them luck on the implementation... I think there have a steep challenge ahead of them. One thing my boys told me is that they have QR codes for homework/assignments/worksheets that everyone used phones to scan and do work on there with GSuite - and the school provided laptops won't be able to do this. The that everyone in K-8 everyone has can do QRs okay though.
> The adults unlock the [Yondr] pouches with special magnets as pupils leave for the day.
> Unsurprisingly, pupils have hacked the system. (“What do you expect?” Eva says. “We’re middle-schoolers.”) The girls recite a list of workarounds. Those magnets have become hot commodities, and a few have gone missing. Pupils have been seen banging pouches open in the toilets. Other pupils have faulty cases that no longer lock but have kept that information to themselves. The girls say that since phones have become a forbidden fruit, pupils only crave them more.
https://www.economist.com/united-states/2024/06/06/american-...
A Mobile First Approach to Learning
Today's active learners have a need for speed. The Blackboard App gives students the information they want, the connections they crave, and the personalisation they demand, on the go. We're putting learning directly in the hands of your students, so they can stay connected with their educational journey anytime, anywhere.
Smartphones, those endless distraction generators, have about as much place in school as do Game Boys and Nintendo Switches. The ability to focus is a habit you can develop; school is a great place to learn that habit while you're still young.
So slowly seeing how tablets or laptops are replacing all that paper I'm envy those kids. But at the same time I see the dangers, how kids are addicted to the mobiles and the Internet; school should set such devices to be tools and not potential form of entertainment as much it's only possible.
* frame rate sucks too much for tik-tok to be any good
* easier on the eyes
* useless for doing homework on, so the kids go back to paper where they have to show their work anyway.
I dunno this might be the way. Instead of artificially limiting platforms, let the platform's natural limitations do the work.
I had her eventually just take screen shots and send them to the printer. From there? She would fill in her answers, take a picture of the work, and then drop the image into the power point knockoff.
We got a note from the Principal about how "printing" was not supported.
Whatever.
Many months later we got a stern letter that yt had to be blocked because students weren’t using it for assignments. Who could have predicted such a thing? :-P
It all started during covid too so I had very limited ability to say no.
Battle #1 is combining the complexity and abundance of electronic devices with the time, dedication, and cleverness of kids requires (literally) writing a bug free operating system & application ecosystem as well as nearly every school employee having a completely accurate understanding of how to manage them. The goal here is never to get to 100% compliance but to add friction to noncompliance so it's easier for workers to do their job and get through the day.
Battle #2 (the part these kinds of bans focus on) is on setting expectations for when electronic devices are allowed at all. Whether or not students always comply isn't even the goal of this battle, it's all about making the problem clear and swift to deal with: "I saw your phone during school hours so you're caught and it's confiscated" isn't about preventing kids from being sneaky, it's about making the enforcement easy.
They are sometimes told to get their phones out in class to perform work.
In theory phones are banned outside these hours, but unless a teacher is in the room that’s not enforced.
A friend of mine works in a boarding school where the pupils are provided tablets in order to do their work, join video calls etc... .
Yes, every youngster has some fears communicating with people experienced in their proffssion of choice, but it is up to the experience people to engage with them and up to them to do the same. Locking themselves out of conversations during lunch is not a habit that builds good and valuable relations with colleagues. It really feels like these youngsters are addicted, or at least they are not in the habit of joining conversations, lacking the skill as everyone does at the start, but now also a method available to avoid honing those skills.
An interesting consequence about the wearable ban is that they also banned medical electronic devices (e.g., heart monitors or blood sugar monitors) and parents are required to meet with administration to approve their use [1].
[1]: https://greenwichfreepress.com/schools/greenwich-schools-ann...
Simply put. They had rules in place but failed to enforce them.
Why will banning them make the enforcement problem solved?
Whether the phone was being used is debatable. Whether it exists is not. Banning makes communication and enforcement easier.
Kids fe still going to bring them, and kids are going to still feel as it’s their right to have them. On top of that only a few people in the sv bubble would agree with taking phones away.
I’ve seen kids screaming for iPads on flights, too. I don’t have high expectations for them in life.
Also, when did we normalise violent kids? If a kid attacks a teacher for any reason, they should be automatically suspended at a minimum.
> only a few people in the sv bubble would agree with taking phones away
I live in a rich town in the Rockies. Most parents don’t let their kids take phones to school. (None of the private ones permit them.)
There is an emerging class divide on phones is schools. When you meet them, you can clearly tell which kids need their phones to function and which do not. (Eye contact during conversation.)
Second, they're capable of texting (they connect to your phone via Bluetooth)
I understand there's probably a problem creating a clear separation, but in times where lack of movement and exercise is causing major health problems, we probably shouldn't disincentivize young people using fitness devices.
In fact, to be honest I'd not be convinced that it works even in over-18s.
The only tech hardware we'd used before then was old iMacs with yellowed vinyl keyboard covers and ancient Windows XP desktops. The Touch was like a magic alien object. Everyone was magnetically attracted to looking at it. It looked like a shiny stainless steel candy bar. Everyone in the room knew immediately they'd be the coolest if they got a phone by high school.
Previous generations got flip phones in high school - around the time they got their learner's permit. The only apps were calling, SMS, or tetris. You could tell how cool a phone was by its color. Forget swappable screen backgrounds; the coolest phone of 2006 had colorful swappable front and back plastic plates.
Sending text messages was powerful before phones arrived. It was basically telekinesis. I missed that entire era.
My generation was not satisfied with just SMS. They needed to be organizing parties through emails. They needed to be trading drugs and candy through Snapchat. They needed to be covertly taking photos of classmates and teachers and emailing them to each other. They needed to be coordinating fractal-style bullying strategies through group chats.
By the time I got to 9th grade, every one of my peers had phones: first gen Androids, Blackberries, Samsung S, their parents' old iPhones. Everything happened at once. Facebook. Twitter. Instagram. Temple Run. Minecraft. Tumblr. Hidemyass. Snapchat. Pinterest.
I missed the boat on most of those, but Tumblr was fun. Some friends from Syosset and I did wacky role-playing games via the anonymous question asking boxes. It was the highlight of the year.
Bart Palosz committed suicide after some kids (whose names GPS has still managed, or been bribed, to conceal) bullied him and smashed his phone. Did they ever see any consequences?
In 11th grade, was told by a teacher that I should be happy when I scratched my laptop because it meant I wouldn't be able to worship it anymore. The teacher was right.
After my 10th grade the school instituted a Chromebook program. I never picked mine up. As far as I know students only ever used them to write Google docs, watch porn, play Miniclip flash games, cyberbully each other, and click through shitty Aplia homeworks. Did any of you HN readers work on or found Aplia? If so, fuck you. Especially you, Paul Romer.
As far as I'm concerned the $250 the Chromebooks cost apiece would have been better spent on $100 of books, $100 of legal pads, and $50 of nice pens and pencils and erasers. But tragically, one just can't hustle your way to the top of GPS IT and earn a six-figure salary in Connecticut by promoting old-fashioned tech that has worked for hundreds of years. No; you need to be selling Silicon Valley dogwater HTML and plastic.
The district has a history of being dependent on technology to appear forward thinking. It aims to appear 2-3 years ahead of the rest of the country, so nobody can say "GPS should have known better!"
The only reason they're so happily agreeing to "ban" phones is that nothing has changed in the last 5-6 years. Students have gotten dumber and more addicted to technology. There's no more new technology to get a raise from introducing except maybe LLMs.
P.S. I would bet $10,000 GPS won't genuinely enforce the ban due to threats from the 20ish students in the system with paranoid billionare helicopter parents.
Sent from my iPhone
But the tech isn't going away, and it can be pretty useful, empowering, cool and democratisering.
We just need to learn how to deal with the tech in a healthy way, and these bans are progress if you ask me.
I think the smartphone is just too much of a slotmachine, but we are just learning about that, and learning about what to do against it. Smartphones took a whole generation by surprise, the kids, but also their parents. I received rotten.com style videos on the family email address, havging a good conversation about it with my flabbergasted father... then smartphones came. That generation grew up quickly, and differently, and the parents were just slapped in the face with it. But it's changing, we're learning.
Edit: You deleted your comment, anyway, was going to answer this:
Hmm, now that I look more closely indeed I'm probably >10 years older. We had our first dumbphones at around 16-17 (Ericsson GF768 at ~17).
I do remember the thrill of sleeping with it next to my bed and receiving a text during the night. Magic.
You sound like my generation though ;) I bet you had a hard time in between your year mates. The current generation also has people like you btw. Not many though.