American society has always been HIGHLY punitive with an almost non existent interest in actually solving a problem. Even the most “liberal” of us if you mention plugging the social/economic holes that lead to massive crime spikes get all
“Mayyybbeeee I guuueeeesssssss but like what you can’t just NOT throw the book at them and ruin their life forever?!?! How else will they stop doing crime if we don’t effectively take away their ability to earn a valid living via criminal charges?!?!”
Something I’ve found to have worked well in the past is phone breaks. It helps regulate phone usage and makes students far more likely to pay attention, myself included. The teachers that had the most success gave us phone breaks. Regulation and breaks > punishments.
That’s actually a pretty elegant solution. A teacher being against something that motivates the kids is a losing battle to begin with. Extending that olive branch stops that bridge from being burned, and there’s been all those studies that show prudent use of breaks increase productivity, including outside of that environment
This does seem like a pretty good idea.
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, you can quickly search up some information. I don’t remember what it was, but I remember that once in middle school teacher said something I wasn’t quite sure about, but also I wouldn’t ask if I wasn’t more sure. So I looked it up, seeing that I was right, I asked if it rather wasn’t meant to be that other thing, he checked too and indeed he was wrong.
Also, my mind often wanders off. And it may happen that I suddenly can’t remember something. Could just be some word I could look up on my phone in less than a minute. Option B: Keep thinking about it till the rest of the class. I can’t stop thinking about that until I either remember or find it.
Next, spine. I am currently in high school. Phones are allowed here. Any time. So, I utilized my scanner and digitized one 500 or so page book I couldn’t find on the internet, and then used it as PDF instead of a physical book. It is less likely that I would forget my phone. I wish schools would have options for e-ink tablets instead of having to carry many heavy physical books. That used to be problem mostly in elementary school and middle school. Same goes for note taking.
Obviously, the last example can be easily solved by modernization.
Fast talking teachers. I can’t write that fast. I mean, I can, but then I can’t decipher my handwriting, which is already hard anyway. Voice recorder is a quick solution. Obviously, it is easier to look through notes than audio, but IT IS NOT MEANT TO BE A REPLACEMENT FOR NOTES, just a help.
But do take that with a pinch of salt. Especially in elementary school, I used to be one of those weird kids who greatly preferred being liked by the teacher over having friends. So even though I had a phone at the time, I never used it during classes because teachers disliked it.
But at least during breaks it should be allowed. Otherwise kids will find much more dangerous ways to entertain themselves.
Option B: Keep thinking about it till the rest of the class. I can’t stop thinking about that until I either remember or find it.
Option C: Write it down.
It’s not like I am thinking about it to not forget what I wanted to remember. It’s that it will keep bugging me until I remember.
I have no idea what you’re trying to say.
Bugging you until you remember? You write it so that you can’t forget and so it stops bugging you.
Bugging you because you need that info itch scratched right now? Aka instant gratification. Then you have to learn to not need instant gratification. Seriously, it’s another skill.
… yes, my phoneless childhood was super dangerous. it’s amazing i survived a couple of decades without one!
I mean, comparing class with active kids throwing stuff around and ones just sitting and playing on their phones, I’d take the second. Cyber bullying may be hard to detect though, but it’s not like schools care either way.
If you want to teach kids how to look up information, you can create spaces for that. They don’t need unrestricted access to their smart phones to accomplish that throughout the day. Hell you can relax your policies as they grow up and show the maturity to handle having a smart phone in the classroom. If schools want to do that, I am all in favor of it. But they would have to start early and build a system, which is a lot to ask of already overworked educators.
I am not talking about unrestricted access either. It depends on age, but they could always just ask the teacher if they’re allowed to look up something. And also I don’t see how disallowing phones during breaks helps education. It’s meant to be a break.
I’m not sure how anything I’ve written contradicts this tbh. I agree. I literally said I’m cool with schools having increasingly relaxed policies as kids mature
All this is spoken like an entitled bratty immature kid. (No offense, it’s just your age and you’ll grow out of it)
There’s a reason why you can get a ticket or be charged with distracted driving while you’re on your phone and behind the wheel of a car. IT IS A DISTRACTION. FULL STOP.
Stop lying to yourself and to us in the process.
- Using phone while driving is much bigger issue.
- This phone issue has never affected me personally. I am defending OP and others.
- I am not talking about using the phone all the time for some stupid thing. It gives you access to a lot of information when needed.
Also if you trust kids with making life changing decisions, this is unfair.
Also sorry if I sounded as you described. I only started carrying the phone with me since I was 15. I was too worried about breaking it (it’s not cheap thing). That makes finding positive points (that would apply to younger kids) a bit harder.
Edit: Also, don’t be worried, I would almost never voice my opinions in real life.
Spoken like an introverted someone who HAS ALREADY been affected socially in a negative way by their cell phone use.
The entitled and bratty part of your comments = when people tell me not to use my phone I simply DONT use it or bring it. What’s the problem exactly? You want access to an encyclopedic knowledge in class? You don’t have a laptop or computer in the room you can use ?
Maybe you use your phone only for the most strictly academic things, but most people don’t.
Finally, I don’t trust kids to make life changing decisions. See all the high schoolers who got suckered into a worthless degree from the University of Phoenix. It’s very fair to take the reigns from people who can’t control themselves and their impulses.
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
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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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
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.
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.
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.
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.
If schools only focused on what students were motivated to learn, I’m not sure schools would really be accomplishing much. Not to say that schools shouldn’t foster motivation in students. Just that technology, especially social media, is very effective at distracting people.
You can increase motivation to learn by making lessons more engaging even if it’s a subject they’re not personally interested in. But making lessons more interesting and engaging is not easy and we can’t expect all teachers to have the skills and resources to do the research and development needed to produce lesson plans that are really interesting. I think it could be improved by putting more money into developing interesting lesson plans centrally and distributing the materials to teachers to follow instead of just producing dry curriculums. Teachers need support.
But also, screen addiction is very real
Agreed. I’m not defending phones in class, just pointing out that there’s more work that can be done with lesson plans as well.
I have literally built a dungeons and dragons campaign to learn statistics, and had some students on their phones. I’m not a dancing bear, and having a dopamine panic-button makes it near impossible to engage with anything challenging (I struggle with it too and know it’s an anxiety crutch, but it’s super maladaptive).
I fully support kicking kids off their phones in class, I don’t think any lesson no matter how engaging can compete with that. I’m not supposed to be on my phone during meetings, I think it’s perfectly reasonable to ban phones from class. I was just commenting that work can be done to make lessons more engaging when phones aren’t involved. There’s of course a limit to what you can do, and some subjects are just inherently harder to get kids into, like statistics. But seriously good on you for doing that. I’m sure that while it didn’t have perfect engagement, it was far better than just teaching it to the book.
Just curious, is there a place you can share that lesson plan to other teachers? It’d be a shame for all that work you did to not get to be used in other classrooms as well.
That aren’t motivated and are bored as hell; the average motivation level for schools where I live is a 2.9… out of 10. If kids aren’t motivated and they have devices on them, what do you think they would do in class?
They would probably be more likely to stare at their phones instead of learning if they did.
I do think that having students sit at desks for hours at a time is not an effective way of teaching. Giving students different ways of learning is beneficial and more likely to motivate them. But that usually is more work and more expensive to do.
In an ideal world, every student would have an individualized, self paced learning program with a dedicated teacher. Unfortunately, that’s not the case for nearly any student.
I would be interested to see how a self paced learning program with a dedicated teacher would end up if it was focused on embracing getting sidetracked. I know I’ve sat through history classes in the past and had semi-unrelated questions I wanted to research or ask about but didn’t want to waste people’s time. In situations like that I would prefer to have a computer to get a quick answer versus pondering it in the back of my head.
There must be some truth to an idea that you don’t learn as much from an answer from a question you didn’t ask.
Man, I remember a couple teachers that encouraged randomly asking questions like that, and the whole class was really engaged. It was very rare but an amazing environment to learn in. I feel bad that there’s so many people that never got to have those sort of teachers.
It’s like the educational equivalent of a gateway drug. Some of the electives I took like programming really encouraged it and that’s what kept me interested even afterwards with subpar instructors.
I think at a certain point, you should be able to drop math as a subject and take programming instead. There’s no shortage of math concepts in programming that still require understanding of underlying concepts, but I can easily say if I had that option in school, I’d have learned way more in a programming class than I ever did in math.
I mean programming is a way to get someone engaged and to some degree there can be creativity. It would almost be like a more topical and realistic version of a word problem
I had a history teacher in school that liked me even though I barely paid attention in class. I was bored in the class itself, but loved history and would spend the entire period just reading the textbook because I found it interesting. So even though I didn’t pay attention I would still ace assignments like nobody else in there.
I was usually a couple chapters past the class at any given time.
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You’re not supposed to have fun. You’re supposed to learn so you can get a job that you enjoy.
Hi, elder leftist here. The whole education system is already set up to produce obedient workers. If you don’t believe me, ask yourself how much time is spent teaching kids to organise effectively, or advocate for issues they care about. Or even just build good communication with their classmates, like how to react to bullying.
All that matters is to follow the authority, don’t question the rules, put the things in your head that they give you and nothing else.
The reason kids are bored in school is because the current system doesn’t address the real problems they have, so why should they care about the system.
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What about during breaks? They’re doing that as well.
I won’t say whether it’s better or worse to ban phones during break, but I do think it is worthwhile to point out something that you might not know, given that you’re still in school.
School is most likely the last time in your life to have actual, true friends. In college, and especially in work, your friends will almost certainly be fair weather friends, friends made out of convenience rather than anything substantial.
I get that school sucks. I still think so. But there’s some benefits to how schools are run that you won’t recognize until you’re already out of school. Your social life will absolutely get tougher and you’ll be more isolated. So, my advice is to take the bad with the good. Have some fun with your friends in-person, because that’s really never going to happen again. Please don’t waste your school life on your phone.
Nice reply. You made me reconsider that part about phones during breaks.
It is too late for me, but I believe it is for the better. If I made friends with the kind of classmates I always had, I believe they would have bad influence on me. For example, last year the class’ main character, 17 at the time, found someone’s shoes in locker room, unattended. He decided to piss into them. Also popular is weed, vaping, alcohol, making mess in places like McDonald’s (like mixing a burger with cola and spilling it all over the table…), damaging school property on purpose, etc…
While not friends, I do have good memories about some teachers that will last. My elementary school teacher was quite nice. She would always listen if I wanted to talk about something, even if it was relatively nonsense. If I found something interesting, I was always hyped to tell her. Basically like a mom should be.
In middle school, my physics, chemistry and math teachers were nice.
You could always have some conversation with physics teacher, whether school related or not. He always kept happy mood, at least on the outside.
The math teacher did similarly, but I also appreciate how hard he tried to get us to learn at least something. He got to the point where he shown us the exact questions that were to be on exam. It didn’t help. Now I feel quite sad about him, you could sometimes see him on the verge of crying. Especially during and after the COVID-19 lockdown. He tried hard to make math more interesting.
Chemistry teacher was also nice. I could talk with him about problems I had at home. Being able to tell about your problems to someone is nice. Also, when the COVID-19 lockdown came, we had online learning. I didn’t have internet access, and only got an old laptop with broken keyboard from neighbor and I didn’t have money for a replacement keyboard. It really surprised me, but he gave me money to fix that laptop. I don’t know if he also intended that, but it made me feel like I had to put more effort into studying. I won’t forget that.Most of my high school teachers are nice though. Actually there’s just 1 I don’t like. That is a nice change since till high school it was just the 4 aforementioned that I liked.
Take it from an old man, as you grow up friends drift apart. People change, you meet new people. You’ll always cherish those friendships you had back then, but you will never all be together in one place like you are now. People will have jobs, families, girlfriends, spouses, commitments. I love my best friend to death, we’ve been friends since jr high, but I see him once a year now.
Take advantage of the time you have with them. Go to the gas station and get a soda that’s too big, walk around town aimlessly, do boring kid stuff. You’ll have all the time in the world to be online here later, late nights writing comments at 10pm, thinking fondly about doing stupid teenager stuff with your friends 20 years ago
Yup, I haven’t seen one of my friends in person in years because he’s in the army. Another one lives right here in town but has a whole family to take care of, but every single time he’s asked me to do anything with him has been a bad time, and I kinda feel bad about it. The rest of my friends have mostly either moved elsewhere or I’ve just not kept in touch.
So yeah, even people that I kept in touch with for some time after I got out of school have basically not been in my life for some time now. I’ve got a few friends that I usually hang with online, but all my school mates have basically gone their separate ways.
What would you prefer the school do?
How could they motivate you to actually pay attention in class instead of playing with your phone? Honestly ask yourself if this “addressing motivation” would make geometry more interesting than tiktok.
Maybe if they used blender(the software) to explain it.
If they try to use a blender (the kitchen appliance), I’m sure it will also become interesting.
The blending will continue until morale improves
not treat students like indentured servants? productively encourage them to pay attention instead of imposing austere zero tolerance policies? do you really think that people in ancient greece paid attention to every second of lecture because there weren’t any phones?
could you, yes you, in your day to day life, handle being forced to go through school again? to learn something new every hour of every weekday and being given obligatory deadlines, not even being paid for the work, having to be there at like 7:30am, having even less control over your personhood and freedom just a few years after being born?
school didn’t have to suck as much as it did.
This opinion is wild bud. Firstly, I disagree with the every hour of every weekday; once you take into account breaks, lunches, the much shorter working day, sports, and the way classes should usually be front-loaded with information then flipped for engagement, you’re maybe spending 10-15 hours a week “learning” and the rest practicing/applying. In my career I’ve generally had to spend much more than that each week learning.
Secondly you aren’t slaves, you have the option to down tools and just remain poorly educated without ramifications that endanger you immediate life/safety. That you don’t is as much to do with knowing it’s a shit idea, as it is societal pressure.
Thirdly, the people of Ancient Greece didn’t pay attention every second, but when their mind wandered they were at least able to move back to the topic at hand, tbh, if you miss enough context scrolling reels, you won’t be able to catch back up, and so many will just give up and stay on their phones.
Lastly, society around you pays for your education, it’s part of the social contract we live in. The resourcing of schools is already woefully low, please define how stretching those resources to accommodate completely preventable delinquency, is at all worthwhile. By draining time you aren’t only robbing the school, you’re taking from the students next to you who don’t want to spend their time acting like entitled children.
In my career I’ve generally had to spend much more than that each week learning.
Important point. If you’re in a career that’s at all demanding, you are going to be learning for the rest of your life. School prepares you for that. The specifics aren’t important, what you should be learning in school is approaches to research, study, and problem solving. Schools could probably do more to make that clear.
Sounds like everyday work life
This is how work operates, except I’m there for two more hours.
You can quit work, and you have rights. Children have neither.
You can quit work and starve. You can quit school and get in a little bit of trouble. I don’t really see the equivalence here.
Children have lots of rights in this analogy, in fact in a great many places, they also have a right to be cared for by the state that adults don’t. Statutory service provision routinely is written in protection of children.
Weirdly, most people don’t have a right to take out and use their phone when working, and given that’s the thread topic it’s a decent sized hole in your argument. I worked a high-wage and technical role, white collar as it gets, and you know where my phone was when I was meant to be concentrating on my work, in my pocket. Know what would happen if I was fucking about on it when I had something important to do? Disciplinary, HR, threatened loss of livelihood. If you’re arguing you’re not being treated like adults, I have bad news for you.
Look, you’re not some oppressed underclass of unperson and your myopic determination to cast yourself as such is a genuine insult to people living under actual hardship.
Your statement would sound a lot less dramatic if not for the fact that literally everyone goes to school.
“Not being paid for your work” 🤣🤣🤣
My man, your book report is contributing nothing to society. Future scholars will not look upon it with awe. It is purely an exercise to help students as a whole develop as individuals.
Here’s my question - how do you expect teachers, who are actually providing society with a much-needed service, who are already well understood to be overworked and underpaid, to productively encourage students to pay attention?
could you, yes you, in your day to day life, handle being forced to learn something new every hour of every weekday and being given deadlines, not even being paid for the work, having to be there at like 7:30am, having even less control over your personhood or freedom just a few years from being born?
The fuck you think everyone has to go through in their lives prior to being an adult.
Edit: though
My school solved it by existing before smartphones did
Well said. Social media is designed specifically to hold attention and encourage addictive behavior. There’s no way to compete.
In one episode of hannah montanna they use a song and dance to learn about the skeleton bones. I still remember the song after like 10 years, lol
I agree that the school environment should be more motivating, but there’s no way to compete with apps and games designed to be addictive, even adults have trouble avoiding their phones at work.
it’s called having discipline
My district’s got tablets for pretty much everything and the kids don’t really know how to troubleshoot any problems with them and there’s no time to teach them to troubleshoot those problems and it’s all proprietary bullshit anyway.
I know a place that does great deals on tablets bundled with the latest education software that has doubled test score performance in Louisiana.
I own the place.
I have children paste apple logos on the cheapest tablets I can find.
The test score performance is doubled by flagging the outliers dragging down the average and feeding them to alligators.
But on the upside I’m only partially funded by the Gates Foundation.
This is just a weird comparison
Neither one really has anything to do with the other.
In fact, I’d say getting rid of phones could help improve motivation because when students are more focused on school, they’re more motivated and perform better.
This meme was made by a middle schooler who doesn’t understand the higher-level decisions being made by educators.
Oh no, school sucks.
Not only kids struggle with this, adults too. I’ve seen restaurant visits where everyone puts their phone on a pile on the table, first one to ring pays the bill. Otherwise Billy couldn’t stop texting his controlling partner all night.
There is more research to be done, but so far this might be a good thing: https://www.verywellmind.com/how-do-smartphones-affect-the-brain-2794892
first one to ring pays the bill
Always eating for free 😁
Always eating for free 🥲Everybody knows how to mute their phone or turn it off, and the other end can get used to them being busy and unavailable sometimes.
I was rather referring to having nobody who would text/call me, besides my carrier, of course. But also that means I won’t end up in restaurant with someone.
Seems likes Billy just inherited a bunch of abusers who like free meals
“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.
Yknow they could fix a lot getting rid of textbooks…so uh yea. Hands on shiz for the classes that need them and less teaching people to regurgitate and still missing half the facts they ought to know from history. Esp in a effort to make us history look good…when no we were awful lmao
I dissagree information written in a book is a perfectly valid way of conveying it. Obviously lies about history shouldn’t be taught but that’s not a problem with the medium
just doing tests as a memory exercise is also not good
Problem is there needs to be a alternative for audhd people like me. I can’t do textbooks and I’m tired of being forced to learn things exclusively through them without much practice.
That would’ve helped tremendously in my “logic and algorithms” class that it felt like never got any practical practice to see in code. So much of my computer classes based in the theory of it all without allowing me to attempt it in practical applications. It’s either that or not being based in reality on languages and technologies we need to learn. Like heck I want to get into tinkering too and there’s not much for that in schools where I wouldn’t have to have a better paying job to afford the materials myself.
Plus with things like history it’s bonkers how much stuff I’ve found out after the fact bc of living in the south. Esp since I know they tried to push states rights bs on us, and definitely make columbus seem like the Saint he’s not. Among other stuff bc people who shouldn’t be involved in education are dictating things like this.
yeah but that should probably be handled by a disability support structure at the school
Which they all ask me now that I’m trying to get through things what ones would be helpful and the usual suspects never were helpful. I’ve done research on other possible ones and always tell them I’ve got no clue what would be helpful bc searches don’t seem to line up but all these schools have no lists of ideas for that either…
They still need to teach with something, and textbooks are expensive
Well there’s a bunch of content some of my teachers have pulled from that’s just as good. Hell with history it’s a good idea not to have a state textbook anyway. Shiz omits so much it’s unreal. Or it tries to paint times before the Civil war as the best of times despite us yknow owning people o_O
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.
How do you address low motivation levels though? The response to covid, the endless school shootings, their parent’s jobs, and even a small amount of reading about climate apocalypse should make it obvious to children that society despises them and that they have no future. How do you motivate someone to do well in school under those conditions if they’re not already motivated?
education is a benefit in and of itself. Maths helps develop your brain to solve problems, english makes you more able to appreciate culture which in turn will make you more interesting and better able to socialise, history helps you understand how the world is and that it used to and can be different.
These things are worth learning even if you don’t do them for work
Next level update your /etc/hosts to point time wasting websites to localhost
