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Comment by thedingwing | Hacker News Reader

I went to high school when cell phones were common and most students had them. But, at least at my school, if you had one out during class it was instantly confiscated and returned by the front office after school. I assumed this was the norm, so articles about "cell phone bans" as a new policy are surprising to me. I assumed it always was this way.

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?

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There are teachers out there asking students to look up words in their phone. They forget to add "and please ignore all notifications, games, etc. while you're at it".

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.

Same policy here. Seemed like it worked just fine. If you really needed to use it, you had time between periods and during lunch.

Using a phone during class was indeed never an option, but, can I ask you since you went to school with smartphones (I am much older): Is your experience that most students pull their phone out as soon as they exit the classrooms? Do they spend most of their breaks on their screens? If so do you have the feeling you have poorer conversational skills because of this and would you not rather have just enjoyed school engaging with the people around you?

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.

Banning cell phones from class hours doesn't actually change the social media rat race in any way. You still have to maintain presence. That's just part of being social.

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 went to grade school in the 80’s and high school and college in the 90’s.

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.

Yes, there were distractions in my time as well, but I would say it's quite different because now you don't have to go anywhere, you can just pull out your phone mid-conversation and 'be somewhere else'.

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.

I believe most UK schools have the same policy. However, I've heard from teacher friends that it's difficult and time-consuming to enforce -- kids will do anything to sneak in a bit of phone time during lessons.

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.

> When did schools start allowing cell phone use during class?

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.

Kids are great at detecting hypocrisy. As a teacher, you can't tell a kid to make it through the day without "checking" their phones if you can't make it through the day without checking your own phone.

No, it's 100% the parents. The parents are younger, and phone addicted too. And I don't know what happened in the past 20 ish years but parents are unbelievably entitled.

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.

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