Technology

I'm surprised they weren't banned from the get-go

On one hand this makes perfect sense, on the other I wonder if kids will be more likely to be distracted by their guns if they aren't distracted by their phones.

Seems like we need to educate kids on dealing with such things.

Which starts at home. Parents need to lead by example, to begin with, then actively teach kids about using distractive technology, laying ground rules, while also teaching about using the internet safely (including privacy and security).

Having this be part of schooling, at every grade level, would be a good thing too. But we know that will be a cluster fuck too.

Back to using old-school tech to pass messages in class.

I don't know how I feel about this. I think to some extent, it's again trying to do the wrong thing. Instead of banning phones, like for years they banned calculators, perhaps they should be teaching skills around time management, how to configure the phones to be less disruptive for set periods or all the time, and the like. It's not like people at work don't have phones in most work environments. It's not like most people lock up their phones when they're at home.

Instead of pretending that we can "go back in time" to teach kids, we should look to teaching skills kids will obviously need. I remember being taught to balance a check book in 1997 or so, roughly a year or two before I never used a check in daily life, and the less than one time a year I needed one, I didn't really have to do any "balancing" cause I can do a single subtraction for the day or 3 till it was updated in my online bank account anyway.

Teaching kids stuff sans smartphones is like teaching kids sans books, the schools just haven't accepted it yet. And to all those who are like - well, what if your smartphone dies, or is lost, etc. Well, what if your car dies? You do the same thing, you have a backup plan, but that plan isn't to go back to walking or horses.

The other argument I can foresee is "kids won't learn anything". This has always been a problem for some kids, and phones aren't the cause. For everyone else, you get out of school what you put into it. Maybe some kids can be shown by teachers why learning is important and they'll be self motivated - in which case phones are a net good. The solution to learning isn't to torture kids who don't see any point in it. It's like you never screwed around or just slept in class... You don't need a phone to not learn stuff is all I'm saying.

The important thing is to teach people how to teach themselves. At work I'm always asked to figure stuff out. Nothing I do today has much if anything to do with what I learned in high school or college. No one asks me to do calculus, or the details of the war of 1812. I'm solving problems using my phone or computer and the internet. As soon as you're in a job, all these sorts of restrictions tend to go away in the vast majority of cases.

Worrying how many people are okay with taking away rights from people just because they haven't existed for a certain number of years yet. No one would dream of forcefully taking away adults' phones.

It's pretty normal here that you're not allowed to use your phone in class. I think that's the case in every school here.

The door cubby thing seems like a perfectly fine solution. Kids still have phones to be able to coordinate with parents, but aren't distracted in class.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Around the country, educators say students routinely send Snapchat messages in class, listen to music and shop online, among countless other examples of how smartphones distract from teaching and learning.

Those days are gone,” said James Granger, who requires students in his science classes at a Los Angeles-area high school to place their phones in “a cellphone cubby” with numbered slots.

A growing number of leaders at the state and federal levels have begun endorsing school cellphone bans and suggesting new ways to curb access to the devices.

A law that took effect in July requires all Florida public schools to ban student cellphone use during class time and block access to social media on district Wi-Fi.

And two U.S. senators — Tom Cotton, an Arkansas Republican, and Tim Kaine, a Virginia Democrat — introduced legislation in December that would require a federal study on the effects of cellphone use in schools on students’ mental health and academic performance.

“If the bookbag is on the floor next to them, it’s buzzing and distracting, and they have the temptation to want to check it,” said Kim Whitman, a co-founder of the group, which advises schools to require phones be turned off and locked away all day.

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these wee fuckheads wouldn't have phones to ban if their great bleeding fuckhead parents didn't buy them phones.