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But many students — who use their phones for listening to music, arranging rides home, checking on grades or assignments — are unhappy with the crackdowns. Some check in with parents or coaches by text. Some think the decision should be theirs, not a school dictate. Parents have been split on the issue, with many critics insisting their children need phones in case of an emergency. What kind of emergency can’t be han…
Active shooters?
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Dude you're in class. It's not taking away the entire social network. It's segregating work and play time. If anything, we need to teach kids to lean in to the people around them, not wander off into Internet rabbit holes.
> I'm actually embarrassed on behalf of any parents that think this way. You're setting your children up for all manner of failures when they hit the real world. I don't have hard data on this, but from what I've observed there's a class divide, going about the way you'd expect. Fussellian middle class and lower's the experimental group, Fussellian upper-middle and higher is the control group. Painting with a wide br…
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74 have been hurt or killed in a school shooting in just 2023.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_th... This list says 11 dead and 6 injured in 2023, but I concede that it omits incidents with fewer than 4 dead.
However, even including those, a couple years back I ran the numbers on odds of a kid even being present (not hurt or killed) during any kind of shooting at a school, over a 13-year K-12 school career, and I don't remember the exact figure, but it was low enough that I concluded none of this was worth any real concern on my part at all. And that's assuming shootings at schools are evenly distributed, which I'm sure they're not.
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They're half-formed people who do often need their behavior controlled in some way. Some students or student bodies may be mature enough to be responsible for themselves, but not all.
That’s true. But the disdain and disrespect for students was just dripping from that comment. Is that someone you’d want teaching your kids?
Where? I don't see any of it, let alone dripping amounts.
But yes, I'd love to send my kids to a school where the principal was strongly anti-cell-phone.
Former US public HS Math teacher here. The summer before I started teaching I obtained a cell phone signal jammer (from the EU, where they're legally available) and quietly kept it in my desk. I didn't have to confiscate a single phone over the three years before I walked away from the job. Lots of internal chuckles from me brought on by complaints about the signal quality in my room. Granted, this only worked becaus…
Some US districts used to jam, but the FCC doesn't like it. Something about blocking devices capable of calling 911 is the main trouble, I think.
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> Even back in time when "snake" was the best mobile "app" around (so old nokia times), Yeah, it's not 1998 anymore. Taking away Snake is not the same as taking away a student's entire social network. It's a hard problem, certainly, and we need to find solutions for it. But the situation has changed and the old solutions aren't acceptable anymore.
They have their "internet social networks" before and after class, just not during. If they still use it during, being without until a parent can pick it up is an apropriate punishment. Also, the kids are _in school_, their social networks are sitting in chairs, walking down the halls and eating in the cafeterias all around them. 45 minutes without checking instagram won't kill anyone.
In my experience, not really. Many young people these days are extremely online, chatting with people from all over the country & world, in addition to their local friend group. It's pretty wild.
> 45 minutes without checking instagram won't kill anyone.
Hey, see, we're already converging on a compromise solution :) The OP of this thread started with confiscating the phone for a full day, here we've reduced it to just in-class sessions. It's a tough problem! I don't know the answer! I don't think anyone does. What rankles me is people jumping to, "it's just a GameBoy/Snake, just shove it in a drawer for 8 hours," as the OP of this thread did. That stance is completely divorced from the real world.
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That’s true. But the disdain and disrespect for students was just dripping from that comment. Is that someone you’d want teaching your kids?
> But the disdain and disrespect for students was just dripping from that comment. Where? I don't see any of it, let alone dripping amounts. But yes, I'd love to send my kids to a school where the principal was strongly anti-cell-phone.
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This is American, so presumably school shootings. We should probably solve the root cause, but the 2A death cult does a fabulous job keeping people convinced that MORE guns is the solution, completely ignoring damn near every statistic shows more guns lead to worse outcomes.
I don't understand how students having a phone helps in the case of school shootings. The school will call the police and any parents of students injured/killed will also be contacted by the school.
But parents want to know ASAP so they can rush to the school and "help". Probably because police in the US aren't actually required to actively protect people. And have proven incapable of doing the job.
I have a feeling that bans are not the most effective approach long term. Maybe there's a solution where we educate young people on responsible phone use and work with them to design practices that work for everyone. After all, outside of high school people have to actually self regulate their phone use. Whether they do so effectively varies, but maybe it's a skill we need to think about teaching and developing. Just…
We owe the many, many victims a phone ban in schools.
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> But the disdain and disrespect for students was just dripping from that comment. Where? I don't see any of it, let alone dripping amounts. But yes, I'd love to send my kids to a school where the principal was strongly anti-cell-phone.
How old are your kids? What do you think of their current level of cell phone usage?
[EDIT] My main concern over the next few years is social pressure of the "you have no phone, so your family must be poor" sort. We've had a 2nd grader teased for being poor because she "only has one backpack". LOL. I have some uncharitable thoughts about those families.