I mean it kind of needs to be both. But it’s hard to find a compelling reason why kids need their smartphones fully accessible during class.
Well, by their teenage years, why not all the reasons adults need smartphones fully accessible? Looking up information from authoritative sources? Emergency contact? Coordinating schedules for office hours?
Schools often simultaneously demand more from children than workplaces do adults, and give them less opportunity to excel.
I’m not saying work-inappropriate phone use should be accepted, but taking them away entirely is downright irresponsible. Just like schools who still demand students write on a notebook instead of using a laptop. Raise your hand if you had RSI-related issues for a decade or more after high school? We old people tend to forget how bad school used to be (and can be) for physical and mental health AND for learning.
Schools should just be one huge faraday cage. Kids have to learn to focus and pay attention.
And they need to learn the curriculum
I mean I’m not that extreme lmao that’s also a safety issue. Kids will be kids, they will not sit quietly all school day and be total lesson sponges lol
Of course not, but I think we should at least act as if they should.
Knowing it’s not possible, though.
My kids are in 5th, 3rd and 1st grade. I wouldn’t want them on their phones during class as they grow up.
Like I said prior, I don’t think kids should be on their phones either.
No, but the attention span kids have these days seem to be shortening. Phones and the current state of social media intake doesn’t help.
That said, a faraday cage is absolutely too far, but they don’t need their phones when they should be focusing on the course.
No, but the attention span kids have these days seem to be shortening.
I hear this a lot but have yet to see evidence/sources from anyone. It’s just “look around you.” I don’t find it particularly compelling. I didn’t exactly sit quietly as a kid myself.
How much of a safety issue would it really be? Cell phones didn’t really become a thing for my age range until high school. If there was an emergency, there was a landline in the classrooms.
I don’t think y’all realize that not a single staff member or administrator or any employee of the school would be able to use a phone either (other than landlines I guess?). Schools aren’t just full of students lol
other than landlines I guess?
You mean that thing I specifically mentioned? Yes, I realize that. Would it be inconvenient? Yes, it absolutely would. Would it suck to work in that environment? Again, yes it would. If I’m just thinking about safety, I’m not sure it’s that much more unsafe.
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It’s incredibly unsafe when you live in a society built around smartphones/tablets for health and safety tools to remove said smartphones.
But is it? Landlines can make the same emergency calls. A Faraday cage also doesn’t mean you can’t have an internal wifi that reaches outside that the staff can connect to, or even the students can connect through with a proxy controlling their connection.
I agree it’s impractical. But it doesn’t mean laptops and phones suddenly don’t work. They can still work within the cage and you can poke holes through it with a landline and a proxy to control traffic in and out.
Ultimately, it’s definitely not worth the engineering and the effort. I just don’t think that safety is the reason it is impractical.
Right? Somehow schools survived until at least the 2010s without every kid having a cellphone in them at all times.
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Those were tools. Smart phones are a distraction for social media 99% of the time.
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Ban pocket calculators because the abacus exists. Lazy kids aren’t learning how to do arithmetic because of them.
learn to focus and pay attention.
Not all of us have the luxury of that ability
I have very little faith the person you’re responding to even acknowledges the existence of ADHD .
I mean, I’m doing quite well having gone though school without smart devices and 100% would have never gotten straight As if I had one when I was a kid. And I’m every type of ADHD you can be diagnosed as…
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“oh no i cannot play on my phone, how could school be so cruel”
I actually doubt that phones are the major reason for a post like this. There are many reasons that you could fill in that only happen to some schools but phones happen to be the only one that applies to nearly every school. For example, at my school, our lunches have been cut down to shit 15 minutes at most, and if you buy lunch, it’s much less. We usually have them call 5 minutes left. Sometimes they will say the kitchen is closed, sometimes they can’t because people are still ordering.
School will never be as interesting as a phone. Your teacher will never be as entertaining as an influencer. Your textbooks will never be as entertaining as your feed. What families and teenagers have to understand is that education is a choice. If you want to learn, you’ll probably have to put your phone down for long periods of time to actively listen and learn. It’s difficult. It tires you out. It’ll frustrate you. But you will eventually learn.
Then again - when I look at home prices and inflation, I understand young people’s feelings of futility.
Good luck young people. I’m really rooting for you to figure this out.
people learn things all the time despite phones existing. the issue is not solely being more entertaining. people need to find their learning meaningful and aligned with their own interests and goals. students don’t, and so they go on their phones. go to a college classroom and you’ll see people more engaged on average. still far from perfect, and that system is broken in many ways too, but people are at least studying something they chose and are presumably interested in.
“I’m really rooting for you to figure this out” rings hollow. we all need to be part of the solution. gen Z feels like it’s carrying the expectation of fixing literally every societal problem right now and it sucks.
When I look at home prices I know that school never has been good. People don’t understand what they have to do to drive down prices.
Why can’t Tiktok be used to find the best courses? There is no need for teachers to teach when Tiktok can do it better. Let teachers become mentors.
The amount of times I told my students they can use their phone for certain exercises, then 90% of them just went on Tiktok or played Clash Of Clans, is why is started not allowing phones.
I get that to the 10% it was super helpful but it’s just easier to not allow everyone.
Like flight mode there should be school mode where students can only use a provided wlan that comes with content filters.
Block cellular with thick walls, then only allow them through wifi. Things like youtube can only be acces with a cabled connection. Something like this seems like a good start.
100%, if the schools were funded well enough, issuing school phones would be amazing!
School computers work well because they block most of the distractions but ofc students have 1001 distractions in their own!
OP take a look back at this in about 5-10 years and realize how monumentally ignorant it is.
I don’t think OP is thinking that far into their future. I don’t think OP has any plans for higher education either. It’s been a few decades for me, but when I was an undergrad, if your pager went off in class --cell phones weren’t really a thing yet-- most professors would ask you to leave, which was not a good thing in the small upper division classes as they were very difficult and you had to pass with a B or better to move on in my major.
I just wanted to be able to listen to my music while doing work.
It’s always rude to not listen. So phones should not be allowed during class.
However, It’s rude not to allow breaks, growth, emergencies, and the fact that they are in fact, kids. They should be allowed to socialize, enjoy youth, and understand hierarchy/respect. So to earn respect, you must respect first.
Let the kids have their phones/computers as that is the modern world we live in. They will have technology. Don’t discourage it just because some people learned “you won’t always have a calculator in your pocket”. Well, now you do, so rather than ban it, teach them to USE IT!!! Just… properly.
Adapt the teaching, not the class.
Yeah, the second one will directly affect the first one positively. Essentially, school work needs to be the most interesting thing you can do in school, otherwise you will have low motivation. It’s not the job of the the school staff to make the material extremely interesting, it’s their job to remove every more interesting thing from the reach of students.
Read up on dopamine if you didn’t understand that.
(And yes, this affects adults too)
It’s not the job of the the school staff to make the material extremely interesting, it’s their job to remove every more interesting thing from the reach of students.
And this is how we reached the point where sleep is more common in a classroom than anything else. They should make the material interesting enough that people won’t have to resort to other stuff
Read up on dopamine if you didn’t understand that.
I know what dopamine (the joy hormone which the body uses as a “reward”) is. Since the body uses it as a “reward” if school gives students that, then students will like school
They should make the material interesting enough that people won’t have to resort to other stuff
Nope. It’s all relative. Compared to what’s available via the phone and internet, 90% of school material is fundamentally more boring, because important things are often boring – and there’s almost nothing you can do about it. I mean sure, an incompetent/unmotivated teacher can make the material even less interesting, but that’s also why we need competent teachers. That’s a separate problem.
So the quest to make school material more interesting than the Internet is a dead end – it’s just impossible. So they need to make everything else less interesting. Which means that phones and computers can fuck right off. If there are kids for whom this is a difficult situation and they’re unable to cope, such kids will need intervention. I.e. restrictions in free time as well.
Did you hear what I said about dopamine being the “joy hormone” and used as a “reward”. Your body gives out happy hormones like this after an exercise and other good stuff for you (including school work if it is interesting)
And don’t you tell me that knowledge isn’t interesting. For something to be interesting (by my definition) it must give you knowledge.
Girls twerking on TikTok is not interesting - the way Hitler died is
Memes are not interesting (unless they contain important info)
These may produce dopamine in other ways but they are not interesting
Which means that phones and computers can fuck right off.
I could be considered “tech savvy”, I know a bit of C/PHP and a lot of shell script. Explain ro me how I could learn that without a computer (I’m also self-taught)
So they need to make everything else less interesting.
As I said, sleep is something that pupils prefer to schoolwork. Get schoolwork above a bar that low and then we can talk. Amyway, it just needs to be interesting enough that students won’t feel a need to check social media
I could be considered “tech savvy”, I know a bit of C/PHP and a lot of shell script. Explain ro me how I could learn that without a computer (I’m also self-taught)
By using the computer or phone at home. Roughly half of the programmer workforce currently alive went through childhood without a mobile phone, because they didn’t exist for regular consumers. And personal laptops for children would’ve been perhaps an option for the top 1%, but probably not even them. Since you just didn’t have electronics in school.
Way more than half. Let’s separate dumb phones from smart phones. Even smart phones weren’t all that capable for a long time.
Please don’t learn about how Hitler died through Tiktok. Befriend your librarian and read it in a book.
I dont use tiktok, I hate the app
You used Tiktok as an example for something that is more interesting than learning. (Of course it’s more interesting than learning, it’s digital crack cocaine.)
Make the material more interesting? Buddy, it’s school not Qanon.
staring at a wall is more interesting then (badly done) school
Hey at least they give you some books to read if you’re bored. They’re heavy as hell, but you might learn something and get a well needed break from the phone.
One thing I miss about reddit is that I could just filter out r/teenagers
We’ve been so busy fighting extremists and gross fetish porn that we forgot to quarantine the annoying children.
The motivation problem isn’t the school’s fault, it’s yours. You choose to not want to learn.
Oh yeah I totally needed to learn about what a writer might have thought 200 years ago while writing EVERY SINGLE PAGE of his book, when I already knew that I wanted to do something with technology.
But we didnt have enough teachers for biology and physics and chemistry, so instead we got more literature.
I wonder where I (and our whole society) would be now if schools werent meant for preparing kids to transition into work, but instead about getting the full potential out of every kid.
Im German and I did learn English in school, but not really, because it was taught in a way that made me lose interest immediately.
I actually learned English when I started to watch Minecraft Youtubers in English because they had some interesting contraptions in their videos or something like that (Its been a while, I dont know exactly why I started watching them)
If you think studying literature is to teach you literature, you’re sorely mistaken. Similar to if you think you study mathematics to learn mathematics.
You are taught literature so you can better communicate with other people. What is the author’s intention with this passage? What are they trying to say? What might their motivations be? Now apply this to a letter from a potential business partner or a politician’s tweet and you might begin to see how what you were taught becomes relevant.
Why are you taught grammar? Who cares whether you use the Oxford comma or not? Who has the need to know what mood, theme, and figurative language are? Apply this in the context of trying to write a professional email to your boss or trying to tell a story to engage other people, and maybe you’ll start to see that it wasn’t worthless.
Why do we need to know the way to prove that the angles of a triangle add up to 180? Who needs to know the Quadratic formula and how to apply it? It’s so you know how to think rationally and apply logic rigourously, so you don’t fall into familiar logical traps that we see on the evening news and the Internet every day.
Why do you need to know how cells reproduce? Why do we need to know how the pH scale works? It’s so when people on Facebook claim that vaccines erase your DNA or that alkaline water prevents cancer, you’ll know better.
