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NY school phone ban has made lunch loud again

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Re: NY school phone ban has made lunch loud again

#111

Post by throwaway150 »

justonceokay wrote: post #103
HeinzStuckeIt wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Learning where you fit in the social hierarchy and attempting to navigate that hierarchy is more important than anything you’ll learn in math class. Even if it is embarrassing. It’s not like you graduate high school and then the bullies go away.

That's quite a claim. I'm not sure I buy it. We never had all this lunchroom social drama growing up, and my old mates and I seem to be doing just fine.

Maybe you feel that navigating social hierarchy is more important than anything in math is because that's the kind of culture you happened to grow up in, not because it's truly more important?

Re: NY school phone ban has made lunch loud again

#112

Post by squigz »

justonceokay wrote: post #103
HeinzStuckeIt wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Learning where you fit in the social hierarchy and attempting to navigate that hierarchy is more important than anything you’ll learn in math class. Even if it is embarrassing. It’s not like you graduate high school and then the bullies go away.

Generally, once you leave high school, you have a lot more choice in when/where you are forced to interact with bullies.

Re: NY school phone ban has made lunch loud again

#113

Post by squigz »

SR2Z wrote: post #99
HeinzStuckeIt wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Asociality is not the same thing as social harmony. It's not better for children if their shithead peers are replaced with smartphones. The unfortunate truth is that cliquey behavior and bullying are some of things that children have to be exposed to - you won't come out of school as a fully-capable human being unless you've spent the last several years being exposed to a ton of different adult emotions.

It might be better if those shithead peers are replaced with supportive peers who happen to be elsewhere in the world.

Re: NY school phone ban has made lunch loud again

#114

Post by tuckerman »

HeinzStuckeIt wrote: post #105
SR2Z wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Asociality is not the same thing as social harmony. It's not better for children if their shithead peers are replaced with smartphones. The unfortunate truth is that cliquey behavior and bullying are some of things that children have to be exposed to - you won't come out of school as a fully-capable human being unless you've spent the last several years being exposed to a ton of different adult emotions.

That high school is necessarily a place of cliquey behavior and bullying, and that kids may even benefit from it, is not a universal thing. In some countries, viewers of imported American TV shows are baffled by that depiction of high school, because in their high schools there aren’t such hard knocks.

I agree with you, American schools seem particularly bad at breeding these sorts of unhealthy dynamics, and we shouldn't accept it as normal. But even in a better environment, unstructured social interaction with peers still seems like a useful part of growing up/socialization and shouldn't be replaced with kids sucked into their phones.

Re: NY school phone ban has made lunch loud again

#115

Post by woodpanel »

HeinzStuckeIt wrote: post #96
chis wrote: post #91

It's so insane that they let things go this far. It could have been immediately obvious to those involved that cell phones in class would have immensely negative effects. I mean they talk about a lunch room "quiet enough to hear a pin drop"?? 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 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…

The point you're making is important and I can already see how many, once years out of school, are able to re-frame their memories into something that bullying wasn't so bad and it's actually a social good, etc. It's as if the return-to-office-policies bringing back bullying/sexual harrassement to one's work environment would be hailed as a chance to improve one's social skills. Ridiculous.

I do think though that it's worth discerning here: We don't need to accept a world in which we have to decide between apathetic children stuck to tiny screens and daily traumas. Both things are evil, and in both cases it's a testament to lack of care our education systems have for us/children.

Re: NY school phone ban has made lunch loud again

#116

Post by squigz »

sp4cec0wb0y wrote: post #54

It is interesting to see how rapidly social fabrics deteriorated when smartphones came around. I was in highschool from 2014-2018, and for most of the years, I could remember everyone socializing during lunch, break times, and even in the classroom. Which is odd because we had access to smartphones, airpods, and laptops. Perhaps it was because we spent the majority of our lives without them still? Seems to have gotte…

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.

Re: NY school phone ban has made lunch loud again

#118

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

HeinzStuckeIt wrote: post #96
chis wrote: post #91

It's so insane that they let things go this far. It could have been immediately obvious to those involved that cell phones in class would have immensely negative effects. I mean they talk about a lunch room "quiet enough to hear a pin drop"?? 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 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…

The bullying is still there, it's just moved online. If anything it's easier for the perpetrators, because they can hide behind anonymity, or create humiliating deepfakes - and so on.

The problem isn't phones, it's the addictivisation of social media and gaming. Being able to stay in touch with friends and family is potentially a good thing.

But it's currently implemented as a hook for psychological and chemical addiction, so that user attention can be sold to advertisers.

That is a problem, and I think we're starting to see a movement which will eventually end with these platforms being banned, or strictly regulated at the very least.

It's basically casino psychology applied to all social interactions. That is clearly not a good or healthy thing.

Re: NY school phone ban has made lunch loud again

#119

Post by LtWorf »

squigz wrote: post #112
justonceokay wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Learning where you fit in the social hierarchy and attempting to navigate that hierarchy is more important than anything you’ll learn in math class. Even if it is embarrassing. It’s not like you graduate high school and then the bullies go away.

Generally, once you leave high school, you have a lot more choice in when/where you are forced to interact with bullies.

Also, bullying in school has no consequences, but outside it might have some.

Re: NY school phone ban has made lunch loud again

#120

Post by davnicwil »

chis wrote: post #91

It's so insane that they let things go this far. It could have been immediately obvious to those involved that cell phones in class would have immensely negative effects. I mean they talk about a lunch room "quiet enough to hear a pin drop"?? 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 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.

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