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Comment by phantasmish | Hacker News Reader

We weren't allowed to have any of several different individual devices the functions of which are present in a smartphone. Banning that stuff was more-or-less uncontroversial. Obviously kids in an ordinary classroom shouldn't have instant cameras, and video recorders, and audio recorders, and Walkmen, and radios, and game boys, and TVs, and flashlights, and...

Now we have devices that are all of those things in one and parents will fight you if you try to keep kids from having or using them. Go figure.

What's baffling is why so many more people started thinking all those devices were OK when they're combined into one device. Like, not much of this is novel, we could have had devices that did most of the relevant things a smartphone does, in class. But we didn't because of fucking course they weren't permitted.

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I really don't understand why the parents would fight for them. My theoretical kid is there to learn, enforce any reasonable rules that can disrupt that goal.

It's also in general a good way to form work habits for future aspects. Be it college, a job, military, etc. You can't fight over having your phone out to your boss. You can do it to your professor, but that's your $20k/yr tuition talking.

>You can't fight over having your phone out to your boss

Give me a company phone or you don't get this rule. I'm not using my phone for work if I can't have it out during work.

I use it 99% for work related things during work, though, with the 1% being happy birthday texts or something similar

This is kind of a weird example to begin with on a forum mostly populated by software engineers, because I'd find it very weird if a manager ever objected to someone using their personal phone at a SWE or similar office job, but I'd guess that the sets of jobs where a "boss" would object to someone using their phone during work (but still getting their work done) and those that would potentially have a company phone are mostly disjoint... a complete prohibition on using your phone seems like entry-level retail job type rules. excepting corner-case stuff like some very high security facility where you wouldn't even be allowed to bring any outside electronics in.

Software is a bit isolated from this (there's computers for "research" regardless, after all). But phone policies can be very strict in most other sectors of work. Seen as a dostraction at worst and unprofessional at best. A teacher wouldn't be able to just get away with having their phone out during class unless there's an emergency.

Parents really like the convenience and the feeling of safety they get when their kid has a phone. If they have to change school pickup plans they'd much rather text their kid than call and leave a message with the school office and then hope that the office gets the message to their kid.

We're so used to being able to get in touch with our family members at all times that it feels really unnerving when your kid isn't immediately accessible.

And the parents who complain think that their kids aren't the ones who are addicted to their phones.

That's why these bans needed to happen at the state or school district level - expecting individual teachers to have to spend their time arguing with parents and kids over cell phones was just not realistic.

Some parents message their kids all through the day, they treat it as some kind of social media. Making kids focus on school instead of immediately replying to text messages upsets the parents.

I know a bunch of teachers. This is true.

Some (like, one or two per hundred students or so) may occasionally call their kid when they know they’re in class. Not because there’s a family emergency or something (and c’mon, you can still call the office for that) but just to shoot the shit. Talk about a WTF.

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