this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2023
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Confiscating banned items is not theft. They are fully and unconditionally entitled to remove distractions and your kid absolutely does not and cannot have a right to have a phone in class.
The absolute last thing I want to do these days is to try to remove kids' ability to call for help in emergencies.
Phones are also important so that kids can receive emergency alerts, like earthquake and tsunami and tornado alerts, depending on where you live. Such emergency alert systems provide only a little bit of warning, but that can make all the difference.
You think it should be disallowed even in cases like the one described, so a parent can tell their kid pickup will be late or to catch a ride with a particular trusted adult or to walk to xyz place to wait, etc?
And they can be used to help academics, too, such as for taking notes, recording lectures (when allowed), looking up an unfamiliar word (especially for kids whose first language isn't whatever they're being taught in), taking photos of the whiteboard. And more and more, boosted by LLM tech, they're becoming helpful for things like live translation and auto-transcription (great for deaf or hard of hearing students especially, but also just for anyone who finds subtitles make audio easier to follow along with, as many people apparently do).
A school can tell kids to mute phones, and not to look at them during class (and that part's hardly new - even before phones it was games on calculators and books and magazines and passing notes), but taking them or even forcing them to be turned off (except perhaps during tests) is too much imo. Especially when kids will absolutely bring them in anyway, and the whole thing will just create more of an us vs. them dynamic with the teachers and students. And especially now that phones have become such personal devices for so many people, like an external brain filled with your secrets.
Kids have no need for any of those. There is an adult in charge who is responsible for emergency situations.
Yes, it absolutely should be unconditionally banned in the classroom, with substantial disciplinary action for the first offense. No, the example they gave is not even sort of a justification. Anything that results in the student leaving early goes through the office, and nothing that doesn't result in them leaving early can possibly require them to have a phone during the day.
No, a phone is absolutely not a tool in the classroom. It is a massive distraction. The idea of using the absolutely disgusting shitshow that is modern LLM tech in an educational setting is even more disgusting and anti-learning. Students that need accommodations should be getting actual accommodations, not a cheap facsimile that make it impossible for a class to function because of the massive distraction.
You should absolutely not be permitted to have a phone on your person in a classroom setting before college, let alone to interact with it.
How can you say that with a straight face after seeing all the horror stories of kids with special needs having those needs blatantly ignored by school staff?
Because they're only a minority so they don't count! /s ~Strawberry
Here's a quick lil story fir ya.
Our teachers refused to listen to us while the school burned. Refused to look out of the window and see the actual fire. These people are in charge of your children.
Kids should have phones. Teachers are there to reach and that's it. They aren't pious perfect creations. Phones are a great safety net that we didn't have when I was in school.
I walked past my teacher and out of the school as it was burning. Teachers should not have final day in anything. They are there to teach and nothing else. I'd rather my kid grew up to understand they have final day in their life and can walk out of situations they cause them harm.
Why don't they stop making education stupid, then?
Surface level I agreed but thinking more on it I don't.
Emergencies and early pickups should be the responsibility of the adults i.e. teachers and administrative staff. They are responsible for you while in school so they need to be informed either way.
Late pickups can be discovered when the school day is over and they get their phone back / access to it.
Learning tool for people with disabilities? No they should get real/proper tools and help/assistance. Not just a free pass to use their own smartphone. Not everyone can afford one good enough to be of much help.
Photos of the whiteboard sure but I think that falls on the teacher that they need to have that and being able to hand it out. They could of course take a picture themself and print it/photocopy.
As for laws for if they can take them that is of course needed if they are to be banned properly.
I don't think it creates and us vs them if it's not on the teachers to enforce it. Place the task on non-teacher staff and have reasonable punishments for trying to avoid the ban and it will work to ban them.
The real world doesn't work that way. Horror stories abound of school staff blatantly ignoring students' special needs.
And that problem is of infinitely higher priority than banning phones in school 100%. Allowing phones is not a solution to that very real problem.
Let's review the available options here:
There is no third option of solving the problem of children being neglected in schools. That would require people who don't care to magically start caring, which obviously isn't going to happen.
Therefore, the greatest harm reduction is achieved through option 1.
I strongly disagree. Option one is just giving up on trying to improve the situation in our schools. You're not listening here. "Not caring" as you put it either is or should be neglect in terms of performing their job and thus grounds for dismissal. Then you'll say "but no one wants to teach anyway, there's a shortage as is" and I'll say that yeah, that's another more important issue, that teachers need better working conditions and pay.
That there exists more important issues to fix doesn't mean that banning phones isn't a good idea, it just means that there are prerequisites before it would actually work "in the real world" as you put it.
You're willing to hold off on banning phones in the classroom until neglectful school staff are no longer an issue, then? Okay, that's fine with me, but from what I've seen and heard of our schools and our cultural values around education, you're going to be waiting a very long time.
Does not sure. Cannot though... How does that work? What's so imperative that it warrants cutting off communication for this person's daughter? Like I get telling a kid to wait till in between classes to check, but "cannot have" the right? Why?
Even I think this is a bit pedantic, but it feels like you're using the word cannot for an odd authority grab, and I don't understand it, so I figured I'd question it at the very least
The school has an obligation to educate students to the best of their ability.
Allowing any student to have a phone for any reason is an abdication of that responsibility.
Ah ok, that's true, that is their responsibility to educate the students. I'd also say it's their responsibility to provide reasonable accommodations to in demand constituent methods of communication.
So how is allowing a kid checking a phone between classes and having it put away in a locker (so not on their person) during class the school abdicating it's educational responsibility?
(This specific case is my own "reasonable accommodation" theory, so I'm really curious about genuine counterpoints to this that aren't just devil's advocate, and you really seem to believe this, so thank you for your input so far, it is appreciated)
I have no issue with it being in a locker. I have an issue with it being in a classroom.
Let's be real for a minute. Most employers can't realistically ban adults from having personal cell phones on them, so it's just a tolerated intrusion, but the vast majority of adults can't be trusted to use their phones responsibly when they should be being productive. Kids are much worse, and they also desperately need the enforced long focus sessions without the distraction of cell phones in order to have their brains develop properly. As vulnerable as adults are to the extremely powerful habit-forming nature of modern technology, kids are even more exposed, because their brains are more adaptable and because they don't have the same body of work to fall back on.
Ahhh this is a case of I misread one of your posts it seems.
Yeah your stance seems reasonable enough to me with that clarification.
I don't really know about the long focus sessions being necessary for proper brain development (social conditioning seems to be more the point of that) but I'm not an expert here, so I am not going to trust my gut on this one. (In the effort of reigning in my pedantism, I'm not going to ask the definition of proper development either lol)
In any case, ty for the conversation!
It's not that their brain explodes or anything.
But focus and attention span are skills that need to be practiced to be developed. If you never get that practice, the scope of problems you're able to solve shrinks substantially, because a lot of big problems need sustained attention to make a real dent in. Coming in from a lateral angle with ideas from other areas are great, and a lot of problems are solved that way, but you need to be immersed in the problem space at some point before you get that stroke of insight.
You need to be able to sustain attention, though, and that takes practice.
I get you, it's just that I feel like this conversation might end up swirling into a "what is normal? Who gets to define what normal is and what are their motivations for defining those parameters as normal?" sort of deal.
With the current world the way it is at hand though, yeah, kids do need to be forced to focus for long periods of time so they can operate when they get into the world on their own.
In an ideal world, whatever shape that takes, I'm not so sure that would be necessary, but we don't get to work with ideals, so your stance seems the most realistic.
Good luck enforcing that.