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NY school phone ban has made lunch loud again

gothamist.com

181–190 of 352 posts

Re: NY school phone ban has made lunch loud again

#181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sports gambling is astoundingly popular for teen boys. Already the prevalence of zero sum games like crypto and day trading was getting to be too trendy for teenagers, and this shit just supercharges it.

> prevalence of zero sum games like crypto and day trading Calling day trading “zero sum” seems like a huge stretch. To get the sum to be zero you need to include everyone involved in the market: institutional investors, hedge funds, etc. Somewhere between 87 and 95 percent of day traders lose money.

There's so many of these absurd "investing" trends where financially illiterate people are getting tricked in to buying in to schemes where the only way to win is to be one of the insiders. Or more recently, the Counter Strike skin "investing" where a single change from a company can wipe out all of your investment.

Had you bought actual regulated shares you could sue the company for deliberately crashing the value. But since video game skins are not a real investment. You have no protections at all.

Re: NY school phone ban has made lunch loud again

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How in the world would you keep AI out of schools? Ok, turn off the internet. And ban the cell phones. I suppose a district could block the known AI providers, so kids could only use AI at home. I’m very skeptical this would eliminate the negatives. On the contrary, every administrator I know of is gung-ho about the coming improvements in education driven by AI. (There certainly are SOME, but it comes with minuses.)

most instruction can and should be done without computers. and ban cell phones.

This 1000%. When my wife was a teacher she would often comment on what a huge distraction chromebooks and tablets were. Most of the things being learned through high school do not require a computer and do not benefit from them. Added to that, having kids spend 40 hours a week away from screens is a huge bonus.

Re: NY school phone ban has made lunch loud again

#183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 go…

Ugh this is so tragic but I think correct

Re: NY school phone ban has made lunch loud again

#184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The "Safety" excuse is bullshit. What safety problem could exist in a school that a child with a cell phone can solve ? Fire? School administrators will call the fire department. Intruder? School administrators will call the police. School shooter? Same. There's nothing that a child with a cell phone will fix.

Yeah, I think people are downvoting me because they don't realize I meant what you're saying when I called it irrational.

Re: NY school phone ban has made lunch loud again

#185

Earlier 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…

I think it will eventually settle into a net positive - we're just in the Wild West of smartphones still. I try to use my phone less and less but as someone who loves photography the ability to take a raw photo and edit on my phone is amazing.

I think it won't automatically settle in a good state. We need to actively work towards it. Phones obviously have many useful and beneficial functions, photography, phone calls, etc. It's the engagement hacking from social media primarily which has broken society.

Re: NY school phone ban has made lunch loud again

#186
post #70
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm expecting a kiddo this winter and my use of devices+my likely future kid's relationship with tech has really been on my mind. The fact that people are thinking through this and actually working on it puts me slightly more at ease.

You probably won't have much to worry about until you have to decide whether screen time for your kid (at age 3-4) is a reasonable trade-off for you and your partner to have peaceful time to yourselves. Then it'll rear it's head again, after lulling you into complacency, when the kid is middle school age and all their friends have smartphones. Then you have to decide whether the convenience factor (for you) of your k…

Serious question (I don't have kids of my own): before smartphones and tablets and the ubiquity of laptops and computers, what did parents do to get some peaceful time to themselves?

It's hard to believe that parents were only able to achieve this during the past 15-20 years.

(When I was a kid in the 80s and 90s, I spent plenty of time outdoors with my friends in the neighborhood, and also inside, in front of my Nintendo, either with friends or without. Not sure how much peace my parents got, but I assume it was non-zero.)

Re: NY school phone ban has made lunch loud again

#187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>> There is no need for a phone during the school day I see you don't have kids yourself. You need to sync up with them when after-school plans change.

We got by just fine during the school day for decades (centuries?) before smartphones existed, and we can continue to do so without them.

Re: NY school phone ban has made lunch loud again

#188

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…

pandemic factor is i think critical here

Re: NY school phone ban has made lunch loud again

#189
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.

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.

Re: NY school phone ban has made lunch loud again

#190

> 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.

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