191–200 of 358 posts
good ban. go france!
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Today teachers can get suspended if they even set an angry look on the pupils. I guess they hope people will abide the law at least. https://mir-s3-cdn-cf.behance.net/project_modules/1400/5ab76...
Neither of those are true, not in any systemic sense. Some old people love to grouse about how Things Were Better Then, and how Children Used To Respect Authority. It's been that way for millennia. You ever read Heinlein? Back in the 1950s, his "Have Spacesuit Will Travel" complained about how schools were too touchy-feely, intent more on having students feel good than providing a good education.
The scary thing about smartphones is how they might be permanently changing adolescent and teenage brains, and not in a good way. Checking texts and emails, surfing the internet for information, and yes - even sites like HN and reddit - cause a dopamine surge in the brain that can lead to so-called 'dopamine loops' [1]. In such a crucial part of brain development, my fear is we are turning kids into the equivalent of…
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/06/170622103824.h...
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Not Op, but if it only were entertaining. If I had to guess, probably 80% of my school time was idle time so boring it felt like sensual deprivation. There was little else to do than bullying each other. If phones would've been a thing back then I'd remember rich experiences instead of the destructive time sink I remember now. (Germany, school from 1996 until 2009; currently working on econ PhD)
I had a lot of sensual deprivation as a teenager too :/
"Sensory deprivation".
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>* I'm all for moderation but the kids I have come across in my K-12 experience, if they're not paying attention, are generally pretty bored out of their minds with whatever else is going on in the classroom. Which begs the question; whose fault could that possibly be? The child's or the adult in the room?* Well, the kids are supposed to learn things, not to be entertained. Sometimes the two can coincide, and it's gr…
Completely agree. The kids who wanted to do well always learned the material no matter how boring the material was taught and the kids who didn't want to learn didn't learn a thing even with the most engaging teacher. Teachers can only do so much.
Plenty of schools have random assignment for students yet teacher A's students vastly outperform teacher B's students. Sure, the best student in B is generally better than the worst student in A but they are still generally behind the best in A.
I don't know if it's good or bad news. But what is very disappointing is that when French government deal with digital natives issues, it's a question about "should we fear about smartphones or not ?" As Laurent Alexandre explains it perfectly ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJowm24piM4 , in french) in many talks he gives those times to the French government, we should spend more thinking about how to educate our c…
> full of chalk and blackboard Thanks for the link to Mr. Alexandre's talk; very informative. He's a little heavy on the hyperbole but many of his warnings ring true, esp. the fact that Europe is squashed between the American GAFA and the Asian BATX, with no response of her own. That said, French schools are not esp. technology-adverse; most (all?) classrooms are equipped with a "TNI" (tableau noir interactif) which…
Having led some experiments with those, I am not sure they are a real improvement over a chalkboard:
- they cost much more and are pretty useless without computers / tablets for the teacher and pupils - they require skills from the teachers to operate them - the software ecosystem is poor - slightly OT, wifi is not allowed in schools
So, while the concept is attractive, the current implementations requires a lot of efforts and little value, even in the corporate world.
I'd like to read some reviews about google's jamboard though.
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Sure. It’s pure common sense. And parents can totally send their kids to school without a phone. I agree with everything in this legislation save for the fact that it’s a legislation. My future kid wouldn’t even get a smartphone until age 15, if I keep my mindset for this long. But do we live in an age where parental and community authority are so diminished that parents need the power of the state to bolster their d…
Public school is a function/instrument of the state, isn’t it?
I agree that this policy is a good one, but I don't think should be enforced by the school. I'm not an educator, but if I were I don't think I'd be happy about forfeiting my policy control to a government official.
How would a law like this even be enforced? Are teachers expected to take legal action against their students?
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>* I'm all for moderation but the kids I have come across in my K-12 experience, if they're not paying attention, are generally pretty bored out of their minds with whatever else is going on in the classroom. Which begs the question; whose fault could that possibly be? The child's or the adult in the room?* Well, the kids are supposed to learn things, not to be entertained. Sometimes the two can coincide, and it's gr…
Learning the right things, in the right ways, is entertaining. I'd argue that school is neither about learning nor about entertainment. School is that experiment with the monkeys and the ladder. Its original purpose was making mindless factory workers. Students became teachers who taught more teachers and so on. What is the actual purpose of school nowadays? It's a place where you can leave your children while you wo…