NY school phone ban has made lunch loud again

> I think I learned half my basic social skills from lunch rooms in school

What a lot of people learn from lunch rooms is not a happy social lesson. It’s who is allowed to sit where, and who is outcast from a table. It’s the shit teenagers lower on the social hierarchy have to take daily from teenagers who are higher, even if they are allowed to sit at the same table. High school is widely remembered as a brutal rite of passage, and lunch rooms are as much a part of that as any other space. If everyone was so absorbed in their phones, that may have been a benefit for social harmony and escaping real-life bullying and shaming.

I feel like we have had a long history of overreacting to new things. "D&D is the devil", "Rock music is evil", etc. But we have just encountered one of the rare times where something new actually was harmful. But it rolled in so rapidly that it was universal before we had the chance to push back.

I think chatbots and AR glasses are going to supercharge these social problems at a rate much faster than phones and facebook ever could.

I think the operative word here is 'let'.

The actual levers of control available to those in charge in schools are limited, in the end.

The rules that exist are routinely broken and can only be enforced selectively. Many of the rules are unpolicable frankly and are only kept to or only marginally broken as a matter of social norms, and understanding so there is not total choas. An equilbrium is found.

With phones there's such social pressure to allow their use, including from forces external to the school, that there was never possibly a hope of the equilibrium immediately settling at phones being banned.

It was always going to creep to the current status quo. Again this would have been true even if a rule were ostensibly set.

Society is learning, slowly, that this isn't ideal, and the pendulum seems to be swinging back. It may settle at phones being completely banned in schools, but in practice this will also obviously be moderately chipped away at all the time in various surprising and unsurprising ways. Especially as the hardware itself evolves.

Everyone went all in on tech during Covid. NYC schools were one of the slowest to recover and are still dealing with the knock on effects.

I wonder how long until they do the same to AI in schools?

Here's a couple of arguments I had to deal with whilst expressing my support for electronics ban at schools including a blanket social media ban:

1) "Since when do we consider it OK for the government to intervene between the parents and their children and telling them whats good and whats not? They know best."

2) "Whoever does not want to use electronics at school grounds are free to do so who are we to constrain them? Also, forbidding things never works let them learn."

3) "I think you are underestimating children; if they see that what they are doing with electronics affects them in any way, they will stop using them. Lets give them some credit and let them make their mistakes."

All of which are anti phone-ban/anti-regulation/pro-liberal/freemarketeering masquerading as a product of independent thought.

> I think I learned half my basic social skills from lunch rooms in school. That time period is probably more important than any of the classes themselves.

I was trying to relate, and thinking until around 7th grade school lunch was a pretty awful lonely experience. But then remembered 2nd/3rd year of middle school finding the other outcast that somehow came together as our own little group of enterprising odd-balls.

We would buy large packs of gum (we sold for $.10-$.25 a piece), champion-caliber pencils (we tested a bunch playing a lot of pencil-break[0], sold for $.50-$1+), ping-pong balls/paddles (we had raggedy ping-pong tables near the food-court for before/after school and lunch that the cool kids didn't use so eventually other kids would rent/trade-for balls/paddles from us once we started playing) etc.

I think the biggest thing we did was start and run table/paper-football[1] games/tournaments; sometimes offering our perfectly-folded-winning paper-footballs or champion-level pencils or packs of gum, to make it exciting.

First we used the table we sat at for lunch, then noticing how shunned the un-cool ping-pong tables were, we turned them into paper-football fields (the green colour and white border lines made it that much more awesome as a paper-football field). We started playing before/after school and during lunch. We started doing ping-pong games too in one of the 3 time slots -- I think before school but maybe lunch I forget. But, I mean, this was Texas -- football is football -- we started drawing crowds and people were mixing outside their cliques wanting to get in on playing games (note: these were latchkey kid days in the south, the main groups looked like something out of prison movies; but we were a mixed sort of popular-group rejects, male & female)

Anyway, I would have to agree it was an important time for the foundation of my basic social skill set (never thought of it that way before). As much as I value that time and experience -- to be fair -- these kids are figuring it out in a different way for the world they live in. I've chalked up my dislike of watching my siblings kids being perfectly content to not get up from the couch/phone for hours at a time, as me being old.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pencil_fighting

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_football

It's fear mongering bullshit. "WHAT UF THERE EMERGENCY". Every room has a phone and a teacher with a phone. Absolute bullshit post Columbine 9/11 fear based nonsense.

> I mean they talk about a lunch room "quiet enough to hear a pin drop"??

Look, I think that phones and computers don't belong in classrooms, but instead of assuming that the world has gone that mad, you should probably assume that whomever wrote those words has a tenuous relationship with honesty.

WHOA! Classroom learning is fundamental. As a public school survivor, I learned more on my own than in any classroom.

90's high schooler here. Oh yeah, those basic social skills at lunchrooms at school.

Sitting in noisy lunchroom isn't fun if you have autism. Walkman/disc man was my fav (you know, that thing I used while on the bus, so no I didn't talk much there to others either). Too bad we didn't have noise-cancelling headset back then. Back to lunchroom. Went for a drink while leaving your school bag? Your scientific calculator got reset by one of the bullies. Good luck getting it ready again for math/physics/chemistry/biology class test. But I usually just lunched elsewhere anyway, since I wasn't allowed in the cool kids group, and I ended up finding solace in that. So where did I end up? In the multimedia library! 20 or so PCs which you could use for, eh... 'homework.' At one point I found out you could just edit your student number in HTML, so once I figured the student number of a bully I signed him up to study in one the silence rooms for a week. When he found out I did that, he did the same to me, but -unlike him- I was cool with that. As for that library: other, more smarter kids than me, went to sit separate to study during break. And during lunch break there were people bored, shooting with elastics, yelling, running, bullying. Book reading at school? Didn't happen much during lunch breaks. Some studying, sure. That it was so awesome before the smartphone time, is a nostalgia myth.

FTA:

> The faculty donated board games to help ease kids into the phone-free era. Student volunteers oversaw a table stacked with games: checkers, chess, Yahtzee, Scrabble, Clue, Life and Trivial Pursuit. For many of the kids, it was their first time playing the games, and they said they were enjoying it.

Oh, yeah. I played MtG back in those days but was called a 'nerd' for that, and surprisingly nobody in my class (gymnasium; highest education level on high school) would also play it. At times, I kind of enjoyed something like Black Lady and Rikken, but Poker just bored me, and I didn't like the play for money (it was officially forbidden, but you know how that goes).

> Ko said other analog activities have also made a comeback, including cards, hangman, tic-tac-toe and Polaroid cameras. “There are just a lot of memories that we make throughout high school that we want to capture,” she said. “I actually have a lot of Polaroids on my wall.”

Funny how there's still a need to make photo's. That is one thing I hate about smartphones. That excessive need to photograph everything these days.

Now, about the subject. I don't think it has to be 'all' or 'nothing'. It wasn't 'nothing' back in the days (as I already wrote above, we just consolidated a lot of devices), it wasn't perfect back in the days either.

They had to know. My middle schooling coincided during wave of beepers (early 90s) and then high school was mobile phones (late 90s) then college in early 2000s (iPods but not iPhones). During all that time, devices were practically unacceptable at school. It was a zero tolerance, teacher would confiscate your device, your parent would have to come to school to get it back. It likely was accompanied by some detention or more punitive measure. College was a more adult approach to same, professor would yell or just tell you to leave the class if your device came out and you appeared distracted at all. If it rang, and everyone was distracted, they’d often be livid.

Then, it seems only a couple years after my schooling was complete, smart phones came out and they just let them exist, everywhere. It has never made sense to me how that shift happened so suddenly but best theories I’ve heard are 1) parents insisting kids be reachable and 2) educators just gave up the fight against it.

But yeah, it’s sad to me to think a whole generation had lost core social experience and socialization of such a pivotal age in life. When I hear stats about how kids/teens don’t; drive, party, date, sex, etc yet are lonely, anxious, depressed, etc I’m always like “no shit”

Yes, but were there any academically peer-reviewed studies to prove it with data?

How could they have ever known? /s

A lot of teachers (particularly, but not exclusively, younger teachers) are uncomfortable being strict with students, and especially teenagers. The local High Schools recently banned having phones during class (each room had a pigeon-hole style place for each student to put their phone), but enforcement is poor.

At least some of this is poor support for teacher's enforcement by the administration (I have been told that teachers are not allowed to kick students out of class for having their phones).

That just sounds like lazy teacher discipline in class. Decades ago we couldn't even use calculators on some tests, but now (or up until recently) they could practically have a computer in their hands all class?

The insistence of people, in every era, on staying in a previous technology tier instead of reforming society and culture around the present ubiquitous technology, doesn't really make sense.

What's also funny about that quote is that by "deep research" she's likely referring to googling the answer or using Wikipedia. Remember when Wikipedia was loathed by high school teachers?

Hopefully as a society we can also learn the lesson that tech companies cannot be trusted to deliver what's best for us.

Here in MA there is a 'bell to bell' phone ban bill in the works. I'm very happy we're letting kids be kids again. There is no need for a phone during the school day.

Some people will slap a label like "liberal" on "using my smartphone whenever the hell I want". And then people will think that's how it should be.

Understandable, I never finished Lord of the Flies despite not having a smartphone at the time.

I've barely read a book in the last 5 years. I actually don't think I've finished one. I read ALL the time when I was a teenager.

That's an interesting data point. I think covid did a lot of damage too. Kids spending formative years stuck in their room texting just didn't get the chance to build basic social skills and habits.

But it's hard to separate out that effect from just earlier and earlier exposure to modern phones. The class of 2018 was ~10 when the iphone 4 came out. And even that wasn't nearly as addicting as modern phones - it was tiny, and didn't have vertical scrolling video (except for Vine, briefly).

Smartphones have been around much longer than before 2014. My takeaway from this is that people just always think it's worse than what they went through.

No it was Covid. But one party’s dogma was to close schools and force all socialization to be online for almost two years and rather than admit it was wrong and harmful they blame phones instead.

pandemic factor is i think critical here

You can always tell a Milford man.

When I was in elementary school one of the teachers would hold a decibel meter and subtract minutes off of recess if we got above a whispered conversation.

I think my parents went to this school. Did the nuns slap you with rulers?

I graduated in 2011. Smart phones were rare, but dumb phones were quite common.

The lunch room was quite loud. To keep people from being in their own world on their phones too much, my lunch table had a rule that if you laugh out loud at something on your phone, you had to share it with the table. It was quite effective, though somewhat embarrassing from time to time.

It varies a lot. My kids will run around and play given the opportunity, but when they arrive home at 6pm from after-school club, completely exhausted, I think it's fair that they get to collapse in front of a screen for a bit.

The play-based childhood is over; the phone-based childhood is here.

Kids have phones for "safety" reasons. It's pretty irrational, but hard to push back against without help from on high.

I'm astounded that this has become a thing. My school had a zero-tolerance "if I see it, I confiscate it" phone policy. And your parent had to come retrieve it.

There are kids who lost their phones because it accidentally fell out of a pocket lol

I'm out of school for 3 years. For most of the time smartphones existed, but were forbidden in class. It were the teachers, who allowed it and even encouraged it to be used in class. When the students are already staring at a screen during class, they continue doing so after. When they do not, they don't (at least initially). In my final years, it was obvious who thought about class and who was completely mind-absent, by looking who looked at an school-supplied iPad. > 90% of these people were just playing games during the whole lesson. This was known by everyone in the classroom and the teachers just ignored them.

It is following a magazine style. This is partly to elicit an emotional reaction and partly I suspect because the copy writer is bored and wishes they were writing novels instead.

This does nothing to ban cameras. The fact that a smartphone has a camera doesn't mean cameras are banned. You can still bring a standalone camera to school.

It means your in a large room with a lot of people talking to each other. It's not a fine dining experience where people whisper. It's a social place. The social aspect was taken out of the experience, which is vital to development. The "loud" (meaning, it's not quiet) aspect is not a negative. It's not a "lunch break" for adults to go decompress from the stress at work. If kids want quiet for studying, they can hit their school library, or other places for solitude and tranquility. It's about younger people actually communicating and discussing what is going on in the day, their life, after school, hobbies, interests, relationships, etc.. Imagine going to a playground where there are 100 children. None of them are making a sound. That would be a scary sign. You should hear kids laughing, screaming, crying... experiencing social engagement. People are being isolated from each other because they are becoming "addicted" to screens and short media formats. We are training our brains for instant gratification, but there is no retention or learning going on. Younger people aren't learning how to communicate directly with others. Without these engagements we hobble our development of things like empathy. How to control our emotions with others. It's damaging for all.

That's my take.

Yes, the president of the student-elected body of mostly-powerless "school government."

it’s an america thing

That's just an elected student position that usually interfaces with the school leadership about student issues - it isn't the vice principal/principal/superintendent that run the school(s)

Those of us who hate the noise of boisterous social conversation are the outliers, but it is a sign of their healthy social environment. I personally was always able to find a quiet spot.

My early dinner, empty restaurant habit is the adult persistence of my teenage preferences, and I don't expect my personal tolerance to be their norm.

Tech will prevail on the long term, even with these misguided bans.

The problem, when it comes to smartphone bans, isn't the kids, believe it or not.

My experience (consulting with multiple k-12 institutions) is that it's the parents. If the parents can't be in CONSTANT contact with their kids, it's a problem. People are scared of everything all the time. It's not great.

Schools should provide quiet spaces for kids who don't want noise during lunch. The library should always be open during lunch hours. There should always be an outdoor space for those who want it (unless there is lightening - I assuming you know how to dress for any other weather).

Or we can go the opposite way: for kids who want to be loud during lunch there should be a place for them to do that. Wanting to be loud it too common to ignore, and it isn't like perfume/peanuts/... where we have to force a policy for a minority.

We need to sue Meta (et al.) for social damage caused by unlawful acquisition of addicts from the public education system. (My personal opinion)

Because, like most of the population in the West, HN readers are not actually liberals but rather centrists, which means they lean roughly equally conservative, liberal and socialist on the political triangle - on average.

Sometimes you have to trade personal liberties (makes liberals sad) and/or privileges (makes conservatives sad) to obtain better societal outcomes, i.e. mandatory vaccination or minimum wage. Those are socialist policies.

And since the major media and thus our shared social space is heavily anti-socialist (qui bono?), everyone is closeted and tries extremely hard to justify socialist policies as liberalism, which is not shunned. Hence people in the US now perceive them as closer or even "allied".

Because many people only support freedoms for themselves, the second someone else wants to do things different than they would they get angry because they don't understand why anyone would think differently than them.

Also they don't ever have to worry about becoming young again so they literally never feel the consequences of their ideals and actions against kids. They feel safe in completely dismissing concerns and actual reality because they are so far removed from it and can cling to whatever imaginary view of the youthful world they made up.

I have a kid in a non-magnet HS and one in a magnet HS (in NYC). This article isn't off-the-mark but I would say there will always be variations by school.

All my teacher friends (before this article) had joyously reported on lunch rooms being loud again (and even fights and lol, sex) happening.... But in a good way. If kids aren't getting into some trouble then they're not interacting and learning about society and human nature enough

I learned to use a computer, by doing things that are possible air-gapped. Using a shell, etc. I did not by scrolling through social media, while all my peers treat computers like magic and lack basic knowledge, because they only know how to scroll through apps.

Even today I learn and produce the most when the network is down.