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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

#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.

Re: NY school phone ban has made lunch loud again

#92

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 tiny, and didn't have vertical scrolling video (except for Vine, briefly).

Re: NY school phone ban has made lunch loud again

#93

As a millennial, the concept of public school lunch not being loud is weird to me! I always remember the constant chatter of school lunch. Definitely had my share of hearty shared laughs, and heated conversations during lunchtime.

I graduated in 2011. Smart phones were rare, but dumb phones were quite common.

The lunch room was quite loud. To keep people from being in their own world on their phones too much, my lunch table had a rule that if you laugh out loud at something on your phone, you had to share it with the table. It was quite effective, though somewhat embarrassing from time to time.

Re: NY school phone ban has made lunch loud again

#94
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

in small doses, but I've seen them go overboard to the point where we are better off without.

Re: NY school phone ban has made lunch loud again

#95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The insistence of people, in every era, on staying in a previous technology tier instead of reforming society and culture around the present ubiquitous technology, doesn't really make sense.

Are you saying that reading comprehension is an outdated technology?

Look, I had a zoomer colleague of mine ask GPT to solve a moral dilemma in a personality test at work...

It's...rough out there.

Re: NY school phone ban has made lunch loud again

#96
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

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 of passage, and lunch rooms are as much a part of that as any other space. If everyone was so absorbed in their phones, that may have been a benefit for social harmony and escaping real-life bullying and shaming.

Re: NY school phone ban has made lunch loud again

#97
post #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?

Allowing kids to have their phones in class, even if they weren't allowed to use them, was setting teachers up for failure. It's easy to call them lazy, but if you've ever tried to police the phone use of a bunch of screen-addicted adolescents you would understand. The calculator comparison is not a good one.

Re: NY school phone ban has made lunch loud again

#98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The insistence of people, in every era, on staying in a previous technology tier instead of reforming society and culture around the present ubiquitous technology, doesn't really make sense.

Are you saying that reading comprehension is an outdated technology?

Surely reading comprehension is still required for, well, reading AI-generated text. Perhaps it's not their intention but I read an implication that using humans to source facts is outdated, which is... well, I'll just assume that I'm misunderstanding their perspective.

Re: NY school phone ban has made lunch loud again

#99
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 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…

Asociality is not the same thing as social harmony. It's not better for children if their shithead peers are replaced with smartphones.

The unfortunate truth is that cliquey behavior and bullying are some of things that children have to be exposed to - you won't come out of school as a fully-capable human being unless you've spent the last several years being exposed to a ton of different adult emotions.

Re: NY school phone ban has made lunch loud again

#100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It varies a lot. My kids will run around and play given the opportunity, but when they arrive home at 6pm from after-school club, completely exhausted, I think it's fair that they get to collapse in front of a screen for a bit.

For my generation (just post-Boomer), it was the TV. For my parents, it was the radio. For their parents, reading out loud for everyone to enjoy ("Mr. Dickens has published another episode of The Pickwick Papers !"), or playing instruments.

These things are not remotely comparable. Smartphones, especially social media double depression and suicide rates among teens.
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