211–220 of 242 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If 99.9% of what electricity was used for in a class for was a distraction, this might be a reasonable argument. It's not, though. But I'd wager that 99.9% of cellphone use during class is.
Then they needed to make THAT argument. They did not, argument was lazy "it did not existed in the past, so" thing.
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A 300-word answer isn't 20x more intelligent than a 15-word one. I think Walter said all that needs to be said, and more economically than you did.
Walter's comment could be applied exactly as well to an argument that there shouldn't be electricity in schools (after all, kids survived without electricity just fine for decades).
I went to high school when cell phones were common and most students had them. But, at least at my school, if you had one out during class it was instantly confiscated and returned by the front office after school. I assumed this was the norm, so articles about "cell phone bans" as a new policy are surprising to me. I assumed it always was this way. When did schools start allowing cell phone use during class? Do teac…
> When did schools start allowing cell phone use during class? I wonder to what extent this is an effect of the age of the teachers themselves. The median age of a teacher in the US is ~40 years old, so a significant proportion of them are accustomed to phones being an essential part of social life and hence may be a bit more lenient to students occasionally checking their phone when it appears to be non-disruptive.…
my kid has a phone that is so boring to use (only snake, texting and calling) that he has it in the bottom of his backpack and only takes it out when he needs to call me its truly amazing and i hope to keep it this way forever. meanwhile the rest of his class mates have smartphones and stare at it from the moment they leave their home ... and i assume till it runs out of battery. they dont even watch where they're go…
I had a gameboy with a special cartridge loaded with roms I ordered from a strange European import site that took 3 months to arrive, and this was 2002! I played video games in every class. I was a bad student. I set a bad example. Yet learning how to load roms on it, the firmware, the command line. My poor mother didn't know what to do with me - I was constantly late, skipping school, in detention, hanging out with…
In a parallel universe, where computers didn't take off and become important, we'd have run-of-the-mill jobs today, and our fascination with firmware and the command line would be mere nostalgic childhood memories.
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The FCC is already on a pretty optimal answer in this case, it's physics you'd want to fix. Completely jamming all cell signals disrupts the public and private airspace well beyond the school.
I'm not an electromagnetic radiation expert, but I know my garage door opener has a useful range of about 10 feet, and my wifi about 30 feet.
If one absolutely had to get rid of usable signals originating from outside the school a much more practical way would be to add RF shielding to the exterior elements. After all, if you want to get rid of a signal then subtracting it even intuitively feels a lot more reasonable than trying to add so much other signal you don't notice the original anymore.
I forget who originally suggested this so I can’t take credit. But what if device manufacturers worked with schools to implement some kind of “School Mode” on these devices? Students could retain their access in exchange for schools setting policies on what’s allowed, e.g. you can keep wearing your watch, but it’s effectively in collection-only mode during the school day. Nothing intrusive to the students; more like…
I...don't really understand what the purpose of any of this would be? How are wearables "integrated with daily life" for most people right now? And to the extent that they are for a particular subset of adults...why is this something that we should allow, expect and not even try to stop children from doing? I get the impression that the logic you are following here could be more accurately described as "we should nev…
This is a forward looking statement. The point is that the integration of wearables is just beginning. Banning them might work for now, but assuming the integration continues and increases, banning them might not be viable in the future.
Imagine a scenario where an Apple Watch is also monitoring blood glucose. Or where someone's prescription eyeglasses are also connected to the Internet. These are things that are already happening today, but haven't yet permeated society.
Another 10, 20, 30 years of progress will bring new issues and consumer expectations that may make bans less viable. The point of all of this is to think about potential ways to navigate such a future.
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This would require deep OS-level features from Apple/Google/etc. See my reply to a sibling comment for spitballing ideas, but I don’t think it’s necessary for this to be invasive. Another approach would be beacon-based, where the devices would operate with limited capability if in range of an actively broadcasting cryptographically secure “At School” beacon. I think there are plenty of ways to do this without surveil…
> This would require deep OS-level features from Apple/Google/etc. See my reply to a sibling comment for spitballing ideas, but I don’t think it’s necessary for this to be invasive. This is by definition invasive; having the device maker or OS maker integrate it makes it more invasive, not less.
Apple's work on driver's licenses comes to mind. The deep integration is exactly what allows such a feature to not be invasive. Limits on what "School Mode" can actually do and the actual implementation approach will determine whether or not such a feature is invasive.
It certainly could be implemented in an invasive way. But being invasive is not intrinsic to such a solution.
And keep in mind the alternative is an outright ban, which in terms of absolute outcomes is far more "invasive" to individual carrying devices if you're using a definition of the word that covers "limits access to your device when on school premises".
I forget who originally suggested this so I can’t take credit. But what if device manufacturers worked with schools to implement some kind of “School Mode” on these devices? Students could retain their access in exchange for schools setting policies on what’s allowed, e.g. you can keep wearing your watch, but it’s effectively in collection-only mode during the school day. Nothing intrusive to the students; more like…
That would be terrifying in the case of an emergency; and no, the police aren't the only people you should want to be able to access in case of an emergency. And if there are exceptions, you can put anyone on the exception list (because it's just a list) and it makes the change as useless as any other feature. Parents already have parental modes on phones and they're not using them to this degree, it would seem.
I realize that parents have become reliant on constant contact and never being out of touch, but this is a whole other conversation to have about whether or not that is actually of benefit to anyone involved.
Plenty of reasons to believe it's a net-harm.
> Parents already have parental modes on phones and they're not using them to this degree, it would seem.
This is a good point, and I think one path forward would be to require parents to implement these modes. The solution to phones in schools can't just be policy - parents need to parent. Perhaps they'd be more likely to use those features if the alternative is an outright ban.
Our middle school has banned phones during school hours, and it's been great. Even though most kids own phones and have them in their backpacks, they aren't seen. There are less problems during classes and kids have to talk to each other during lunch instead of going head down in their phones. Parental pushback has been really minimal - most parents love it, and it's good for the kids. Making no phones a blanket poli…
it's all good until that thing that happens at American schools, happens... That is my one hang up here. It would be idealistic to believe that the Police would protect kids, but in reality there are far too many cases of them being grossly negligent in this exact circumstance... in many of those cases, having a phone played a pivotal role in security. I don't want to get too far into details on HN for the sake of ke…
I’ll wait for specific sources, but that just doesn’t make any sense.