Kids these days – in my day, if I wanted to walk oblivious to everything around me, I had to use a book!
My almost-16 year old is raging at the injustice of The Man stifling her rights to freedom of expression, contrary to the Charter.
On the other hand, they are also cracking down on vaping in school which she is fully I support of.
France and the UK among others are on the way there:
Wait, Ontario is only just now banning vaping in schools? Around here, it’s been banned since forever.
The hard part isn’t banning them. The hard part is enforcing the ban. Vapes are small enough and easily-enough concealed that a student can vape right in class without the teacher noticing, and it’s even easier on a bathroom break.
South Carolina is considering a ban.
My older child is starting high school in the fall and we just got a notice from the principal that the policy is to take all phones at the beginning of each class to put in a pouch and give them back afterwards. The kids can have phones between classes and during lunch.
This seems like a good compromise (though hard on the teacher; that seems like it’s extra time taken away from the class). I would like to be able to text my kid things like “I’ll be late picking you up today” but she doesn’t need to read that during class. She has one social media app on her phone that I let her have over the summer but I plan to take it off her phone when school starts (she can check it on her computer when she gets home from school).
The school also has a lot of clubs run during lunch so I think they are hoping that will dissuade at least some of the kids from just having their nose glued to the phone all lunchtime long.
My kid’s previous school (K-8) was pretty lax – the kids were not actually supposed to use their phones at school at all, but a lot of the 7th and 8th graders did and got away with it. This was a point of contention for multiple reasons; sometimes the kids that were following the rules could get pretty snippy with the kids who weren’t.
Incredibly hard on the teachers, but also the students. It means every single class, every single day, starts with the teacher taking something precious away from the student. A lot of students can handle that, but the ones who can’t handle it are - for a bunch of reasons - the ones already predisposed to behavioral issues.
And if even one kid refuses to hand over their phone at the beginning of class, everything grinds to a halt while the teacher deals with it. And eventually a few teachers will say “fuck it” and start pretending to believe kids who claim to not have their phones today, and the system crumbles from the inside out.
People seem to like this principal so I hope at least that admin has the teachers’ side in this (especially since the policy is coming from admin). I guess we’ll see how it goes. If I remember I’ll update the thread with my kid’s reports once school starts. (And since my kid is just starting I don’t know if this is a new policy or not, but I’ll try to remember to ask other parents I know to see whether they did this last year and if so how it went.)
I assume you all still collect phones &etc. during big tests?
My high school experience was 10-14 years ago now, so it’s out of date. Even then everyone had a smartphone and social media accounts. Heck, my Lit professor gave us assignments on Facebook. The school didn’t assign laptops/tablets but a rival school did and it was clearly the future. The school phone policy was out of sight, out of mind. If your phone was out the teacher could tell you to put it away, and if you refused, you’d get a referral. Just like homework for other classes…
I can say that phones haven’t really been a problem for any of the in-person college classes I took the last two years. Our speech professor, for example, banned phones in his class, which he enforced by handing out zeroes. He was perfectly clear about not caring if your dad is dying or your kids are in school, and offered the front office no. for emergencies.
Honestly I’m surprised so many posters treat the issue as if phones are not already banned. I guess my district was ahead of the curve, or there was a national trend to unban phones in the past 10 years. Anyways Florida passed a statewide law prohibiting phones during K-12 instruction time (unless teacher approves) a full year ago. Same law banned TikTok on school devices and term limited school board members, IIRC.
~Max
I am curious about how people expect to implement contraband-style bannings in high school, seeing as you need your phone to sign in to a Microsoft account and all other manner of 2FA. Likewise with students who dual enroll, if they can’t use the phone during homeroom then they probably can’t access college course content during that time.
~Max
I’m not sure that these issues would really be a factor for school age kids. I don’t think schools could require phone-based 2FA for school work since not every student has a phone. They’d have to have a way for students to log in without a phone. If a student is taking college courses, I would guess they’d typically use a laptop rather than their phone. And I wouldn’t expect them to be doing a lot of college work during their normal classes anyway.
I saw a news story about a school where they had the kids give up their phones in the morning and get them back at the end of the day. They had many of the problems you might expect, especially at first, but most kids eventually complied and thought it was beneficial.
I need to do that when I sign in with a new device, not every time i want to use MS Word.
Can’t speak personally to high school as 2FA was not a thing then. But a phone is required for college, for such basic services as signing into the university account to register for classes. If you are among the <1% of the population lacking a smartphone, the solution is to get one.
When I was in high school we had school accounts for all sorts of things. Multiple usernames and passwords which we had to reset every 90 days. For example to view our grades and do certain assignments.
I assume most schools today have single sign on and MFA enabled. The alternative to a mobile auth would be some kind of biometric auth like scanning the kid’s face or fingerprint. Most laptops support that.
~Max
You can’t register for classes on a laptop? That surprises me.
Anyway, schools could do what Judges do in Court. You can have your phone, but if you are using it or it makes a sound, they take it away.
For my university account, it’s every couple weeks and every time I use a new WiFi, whichever comes first.
~Max
You can but the university SSO requires mobile authentication. (In fact you have to verify a phone number to sign up for the account, when applying to the university. That was the case in 2014.)
~Max
The judge can hold you in contempt or dismiss your case - what can a K-12 teacher do that won’t land him or her in deep shit? Assuming there isn’t a ban or it isn’t enforced.
~Max
We tried this at the high school where I taught. By an incredible coincidence, most of the kids “forgot” to bring their phones every day, or “I swear, my mom took my phone away! I don’t have it! Ask Ethan!” Of course, if you caught kids using their phone after they claimed not to have it, they got in trouble, but long experience had made them cagey.
Oddly, they were willing to turn in phones before tests. There was 100% compliance then. If everyone got done with the test before class ended, though, they’d start jonesing.
Student: Can we have our phones back now?
Me: Why? You don’t use them during class, right?
Other student: But-but I’ve GOT to have my phone! Please? Please?
IME, about half of the texts kids got were from parents, and if they had their phones, which they usually did, they’d feel compelled to read and reply. If you know the class schedule, try to hold off texting until lunch or between classes.
The podcast “If Books Could Kill” has a good critique of Haidt’s work (author of the article and book mentioned in the op) and is funny besides. They point to what seem to be major flaws in his assumptions and methodology, while noting that there is something going on that needs examining. They conclude that Haidt’s work is not that examination. For example, he uses a study that found a correlation between cell phone use and depression, but doesn’t note the study found the same correlation between depression and eating potatoes.
Whenever I have a student saying “But this text is from my mom!”, I always incredulously reply “Your mom doesn’t know you’re in school right now?”
Of course, some of them are wily enough to name their best friend’s contact listing “Mom”.