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.
NY school phone ban has made lunch loud again
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Re: NY school phone ban has made lunch loud again
#72Earlier 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…
Re: NY school phone ban has made lunch loud again
#73Re: NY school phone ban has made lunch loud again
#74Hopefully 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.
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
#75I'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.
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
#76No more kids cameras in the classroom
Re: NY school phone ban has made lunch loud again
#77Re: NY school phone ban has made lunch loud again
#78Earlier 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…
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
#79Earlier 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.
Re: NY school phone ban has made lunch loud again
#80Senior 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.