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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

#191

Post by zhivota »

hamdingers wrote: post #150
SchemaLoad wrote: post #110

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…

> 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.

Pretty simple really, we're basically all [1] addicted to smartphones, so we basically all [1] advocated for this. After all, to admit it was a problem for our kids, we'd have to also admit it could be a problem for ourselves.

Even I find myself holding onto my phone during most of the day when not on my computer, I don't even know why. It's an incredibly addictive piece of technology.

[1] - to a first order of approximation, yes I know you're the exception

Re: NY school phone ban has made lunch loud again

#192

Post by SchemaLoad »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #118
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…

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 addi…

What seems likely is addiction mechanisms and social media will end up banned for kids. Loot boxes and daily login rewards banned from games, etc. Proof of age will be required for social media.

Re: NY school phone ban has made lunch loud again

#193

Post by SchemaLoad »

kelnos wrote: post #186
eitally wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Nint…

What era are you talking about? Later than the 90s had computers and game consoles. Before that it was going outside and digging holes, throwing stones.

Re: NY school phone ban has made lunch loud again

#194

Post by echelon »

iknowstuff wrote: post #130
echelon wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But we have just encountered one of the rare times where something new actually was harmful. Next let's ban kids from social media. Or better yet, let's tax social media as a negative externality. Anything with an algorithmic feed, engagement algorithm, commenting/voting/banning, all hooked up to advertising needs to pay to fix the harm it's causing. They're about as bad as nicotine and lung cancer. They've taken p…

ChatGPT "caught on fire" faster than iPhones.

I assumed the OP meant chat agents like Character.ai, not ChatGPT.

Re: NY school phone ban has made lunch loud again

#195

Post by ForgetItJake »

mjbale116 wrote: post #189
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.

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 th…

> All of which are anti phone-ban/anti-regulation/pro-liberal/freemarketeering masquerading as a product of independent thought.

I don't see what you're saying. Are you saying people must think the same things as you do for it to be independent thought?

Re: NY school phone ban has made lunch loud again

#197

Post by 1659447091 »

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. That time period is probably more important than any of the classes themselves.

I was trying to relate, and thinking until around 7th grade school lunch was a pretty awful lonely experience. But then remembered 2nd/3rd year of middle school finding the other outcast that somehow came together as our own little group of enterprising odd-balls.

We would buy large packs of gum (we sold for $.10-$.25 a piece), champion-caliber pencils (we tested a bunch playing a lot of pencil-break[0], sold for $.50-$1+), ping-pong balls/paddles (we had raggedy ping-pong tables near the food-court for before/after school and lunch that the cool kids didn't use so eventually other kids would rent/trade-for balls/paddles from us once we started playing) etc.

I think the biggest thing we did was start and run table/paper-football[1] games/tournaments; sometimes offering our perfectly-folded-winning paper-footballs or champion-level pencils or packs of gum, to make it exciting.

First we used the table we sat at for lunch, then noticing how shunned the un-cool ping-pong tables were, we turned them into paper-football fields (the green colour and white border lines made it that much more awesome as a paper-football field). We started playing before/after school and during lunch. We started doing ping-pong games too in one of the 3 time slots -- I think before school but maybe lunch I forget. But, I mean, this was Texas -- football is football -- we started drawing crowds and people were mixing outside their cliques wanting to get in on playing games (note: these were latchkey kid days in the south, the main groups looked like something out of prison movies; but we were a mixed sort of popular-group rejects, male & female)

Anyway, I would have to agree it was an important time for the foundation of my basic social skill set (never thought of it that way before). As much as I value that time and experience -- to be fair -- these kids are figuring it out in a different way for the world they live in. I've chalked up my dislike of watching my siblings kids being perfectly content to not get up from the couch/phone for hours at a time, as me being old.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pencil_fighting

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_football

Re: NY school phone ban has made lunch loud again

#198

Post by mjbale116 »

ForgetItJake wrote: post #195
mjbale116 wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

> All of which are anti phone-ban/anti-regulation/pro-liberal/freemarketeering masquerading as a product of independent thought. I don't see what you're saying. Are you saying people must think the same things as you do for it to be independent thought?

> I don't see what you're saying. Are you saying people must think the same things as you do for it to be independent thought?

Indeed you don't; let me help you out then:

Arguments must be made in good faith; and when you hear anyone saying anything I mentioned above it is immediately obvious that they are not arguing in good faith.

If they think they are, then their decision making centre is compromised by cnbc and fox news and their opinion must be dismissed.

If anyone considers the above arguments valid and worthy of discussion, they need to exempt themselves from this discourse.

Re: NY school phone ban has made lunch loud again

#199

Post by obscurette »

therein wrote: post #172
paulddraper wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. There existed a period of time where handheld communication devices existed and were banned. Sometime later, someone somewhere made a conscious choice to change policy. It didn’t just happen.

> someone somewhere Must have been a powerful person.

They were. I was there in edu conferences, training sessions and other events years ago and could observe all this massive FUD which appeared – "smartphones are the future", "all communication will be in social media in the future", "books will not matter", "privacy will not matter", "if we ban smartphones, we will handicap our children" etc. People didn't know better and there was genuine fear in education. Or actually, it's still very much there.

Re: NY school phone ban has made lunch loud again

#200

Post by NoPicklez »

chis wrote: post #92
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…

That's an interesting data point. I think covid did a lot of damage too. Kids spending formative years stuck in their room texting just didn't get the chance to build basic social skills and habits. But it's hard to separate out that effect from just earlier and earlier exposure to modern phones. The class of 2018 was ~10 when the iphone 4 came out. And even that wasn't nearly as addicting as modern phones - it was t…

It's also difficult to build social skills if your peers around you are stuck looking down at their phones as opposed to looking at those around them.

If you're wanting to meet new people and chat with new people but a large chunk of them are sitting on their phones it makes it more difficult.

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