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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

#71

Hopefully society continues to develop healthy norms with regard to this sort of technology. Collectively it's taken us a while, but I think people generally are starting to get the picture. Smartphones are bad in a wide variety of ways, but even when people miss some of the nuance I think we can make progress regarding the minimization of their usage.

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.

California just got strict about this, too. I have found a dramatic increase in the amount of interpersonal talking that's happening in school as a result, which is great!

Re: NY school phone ban has made lunch loud again

#72
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…

Parents have always wanted time for themselves. There are Americans alive today who will tell you that they used to play outside from dusk to dawn and only saw their parents at dinner.

Re: NY school phone ban has made lunch loud again

#74

Hopefully society continues to develop healthy norms with regard to this sort of technology. Collectively it's taken us a while, but I think people generally are starting to get the picture. Smartphones are bad in a wide variety of ways, but even when people miss some of the nuance I think we can make progress regarding the minimization of their usage.

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.

And just to show how (US) universal this idea is becoming, a Texas law banning cellphones went into effect at the start of the school year.

This happened at the same time a law requiring the Ten Commandments to be displayed in public school classrooms would have went into effect but was temporarily blocked while it works it's way through the courts [0]

[Texas educators praise new school cellphone ban] https://www.texastribune.org/2025/09/10/texas-cell-phone-ban...

[0] https://apnews.com/article/ten-commandments-bill-texas-schoo...

Re: NY school phone ban has made lunch loud again

#75
post #51

I'm guessing that teachers never wanted smartphones in class in the first place and that this was just about pushing back against the helicopter parents.

I'm astounded that this has become a thing. My school had a zero-tolerance "if I see it, I confiscate it" phone policy. And your parent had to come retrieve it.

There are kids who lost their phones because it accidentally fell out of a pocket lol

Re: NY school phone ban has made lunch loud again

#78

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.

And just to show how (US) universal this idea is becoming, a Texas law banning cellphones went into effect at the start of the school year. This happened at the same time a law requiring the Ten Commandments to be displayed in public school classrooms would have went into effect but was temporarily blocked while it works it's way through the courts [0] [Texas educators praise new school cellphone ban] https://www.tex…

> how (US) universal

I praise you for not defaulting to US-defaultism, which is quite common on HN, but this really seems to be universal. There are also regulations like this in Scandinavia, France, Germany is talking about it.

Re: NY school phone ban has made lunch loud again

#79
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was in elementary school one of the teachers would hold a decibel meter and subtract minutes off of recess if we got above a whispered conversation.

In class that is good. However at lunch kids should be talking to other kids. I know many teachers/schools are control freaks and so they would do such things, but it was always evil.

Have you never been to a room full of people/children? If there aren't these 'control freaks' in the room, then it gets louder and louder until to the limit where nobody can understand anything while all are shouting. It's surprisingly fast, about ~2 minutes to the maximum/stable loudness. This 'control freaks' are the requirement to allow children to have a conversation.

Re: NY school phone ban has made lunch loud again

#80
post #44

Senior Raya Osagie, 16, said she has to “think more in class” because she used to Google answers or use artificial intelligence. “Now when we get computers, I actually have to [do] deep research instead of going straight to AI,” she said. This kind of blew my mind a bit, as I had always imagined AI being used to do homework, hadn't occurred to me it could be used during a class as well.

That just sounds like lazy teacher discipline in class. Decades ago we couldn't even use calculators on some tests, but now (or up until recently) they could practically have a computer in their hands all class?
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