> In the cafeteria, Ryan Tripathi, 16, was paging through “Lord of the Flies,” which he said is slow-going. “I'm just not used to reading,” he said. “I’m usually on my phone.”
Damn, that hits pretty hard.
NY school phone ban has made lunch loud again
151–160 of 352 posts
Re: NY school phone ban has made lunch loud again
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 face…
> But it rolled in so rapidly that it was universal before we had the chance to push back. This can't be it. I was in high school when smartphones were coming out and there was zero tolerance for them or any other electronic devices (dumbphones, ipods, palm pilots, etc) in the classroom. I don't know when or why it happened but allowing smartphones in school was a conscious choice and a policy change.
Upper-middle class parents addicted to constant communication with their children started complaining about their kid's not being allowed to carry their phones, nearly at the level of implying it was a human rights violation. They combined this with worries about school shootings (that cellphones haven't ever helped with to my knowledge, unless having live recordings of children being murdered is help.)
After they got it, it was instantly allowed everywhere. It was another result of the "activism" of the same suburban let me speak to your manager class that has been ruining everything for the past 20 years.
edit: A lot of parents are constantly texting back and forth with their kids all day. It's basically their social media, especially if they don't have any friends, and I bet in plenty of cases a huge burden to the children.
Re: NY school phone ban has made lunch loud again
#153Earlier 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.
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?
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Re: NY school phone ban has made lunch loud again
#154It'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.
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.
Re: NY school phone ban has made lunch loud again
#155It 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…
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.
> In 2020, school systems in the United States began to close down in March because of the spread of COVID-19
I definitely know who was president in March of 2020. Before they lost their election 8 months later.
Somehow it seems a lot of people don't.
Re: NY school phone ban has made lunch loud again
#156It'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 the…
> 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.
Phones, and electronic devices in general, were always banned. What changed was schools started allowing them.
I was in high school right when some kids first started getting (dumb) cell phones. MP3 players were still new, CD players were not uncommon, and ALL of them were banned from being outside of your locker or backpack. If a teacher saw one, it was gone until the end of the day. Period.
Teachers didn't need to bear the brunt of angry parents, it wasn't their call to make. That belonged to the school administrator, who merely needed to say "tough shit". Somehow, the adult children still won anyway.
Re: NY school phone ban has made lunch loud again
#157It'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 wonder how long until they do the same to AI in schools?
Re: NY school phone ban has made lunch loud again
#158It'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…
I always hear this from Americans. My experience in Canada is that the bullying and shaming was limited to junior high (grade 7-9 in my province). Maybe my high school was just too large for any of that nonsense? Or maybe the culture is different - I couldn't have told you who was on the football team, and there was no prom.
All my friends were nerds, but at the same time I didn't feel like there was some brutal social order hanging over me like I did in jr high.
Re: NY school phone ban has made lunch loud again
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because social media sites like Facebook literally said they're going to make the world better, by connecting more people and empowering more ideas. It was all bullshit of course, but people did believe it, myself included. Just 15 years ago the outlook of social media was much more optimistic.
They could have gone down the path of being a service with a monthly subscription. Instead of making the customer become the product. Imagine an alternate universe where, since you were paying them, they kept you safe and secure online, and kept the bad actors away.
The only offering that possibly might have been compelling enough to charge for was Messenger if it existed in a vacuum, but there were already numerous services offering much the same for free (e.g. MSN, ICQ, AIM), and when others realized that is what the people actually wanted, many more immediately threw their hat in the ring (e.g. iMessage). There would have been no practical hope of it making it as a paid service.
Re: NY school phone ban has made lunch loud again
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> In 2020, school systems in the United States began to close down in March because of the spread of COVID-19 I definitely know who was president in March of 2020. Before they lost their election 8 months later. Somehow it seems a lot of people don't.
It isn’t who was president it is who supported keeping schools closed.