What happens when a school bans smartphones? A complete transformation | US education | The Guardian::Teachers say mobile phones make their lives a living hell – so one Massachusetts school barred them
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Students, faculty and guests grab their food from the kitchen, and eat together under a white tent that overlooks western Massachusetts’ Berkshire mountains.
As the close of the school year neared last June, talk turned to final assignments (the English class was finishing Moby-Dick) and end-of-year fun (there was a trip planned to a local lake).
The devices can make calls, send texts (slowly) and can’t load modern applications; instead coming with deliberately cumbersome versions of music and mapping apps.
When a middle school in Canada surveyed staff, 75% of respondents thought that cellphones were negatively affecting their students’ physical and mental health.
Providing dumb phones could be part of the way forward, Nina Marks admits, but she wonders if funds at already strapped public schools could be put to better use.
While Hollier says that Light Phones are intentionally small and slow, so that people use them less, students report that they also break easily and the batteries die quickly, which wasn’t in the plan.
The original article contains 1,688 words, the summary contains 166 words. Saved 90%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Today my computer science teacher asked a friend of mine to show his screentime statistics as a joke. Bro literally spent an average of +11h A DAY on his phone…
Smartphones and apps are scientifically designed to be addictive. The same techniques that make people spend hours at slot machines goes into modern games.
Are you saying the app I’m using to browse Lemmy is scientifically designed to be addictive?
I used to work in public health. One of the things they teach is that only the addict can decide if they are addicted. No one improves until they admit that they are powerless to stop on their own.
I’m paranoid about checking mine… Plus my Deck and computer (for work). It’s probably more than your mate.
I was curious so I looked at mine, it isn’t accurate, it says 10 hours 22 minutes average, but it says 7 of that is gaming, there’s no way i spend 7 hours of gaming, maybe an hour max a day because the only game I play is ants fallen kingdom which doesn’t require much active tike, just enough time to do dailies so 45 mins? , I’m on social media a hell of a lot more then gaming but my social is only at roughly 2 hours. I don’t think you can rely on it lol
I watched the first generation that got personal unrestricted mobile phones for themselves. Somehow I thought it was a good idea at the time. It fucked them up mentally, and then Covid-19 came and doubled the effect.
Now I think that a parent who gets their under 12 year old kid a smart phone should be treated roughly in the same way as if the parent gave the kid cocaine.
I lent my 8yo my old phone, heavily restricted and with Family Link installed; She’s only allowed 2 hours a day and isn’t allowed on stuff like YouTube. There are ways to do it responsibly.
There are a few things to consider.
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She’s just 8, so you have an easier time controlling what she does (I say this with the experience of rising 2 children to adulthood)
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She might not be susceptible to these things
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You just might be a better parent for any arbitrary reason
So as an anecdote your situation is valuable, but as a guideline to how the whole society should handle this problem possibly not so much.
We got an iPhone for my niece who is 8. It’s locked down so all she can do is text, call, and take pictures/video and she can’t contact anyone not in her contacts list. She has some games but can’t use them for more than an hour per day and they won’t open during school hours.
A big issue is parents not bothering to learn how to use and set up parental controls.
Controls like these don’t work if the kid is smart, determined or the parents are too tired or uninvolved. There’s more to the cellphone issue than the actual cellphone.
It doesn’t matter if the kid is smart and determined, parental controls can’t be circumvented.
Unless the parent is stupid enough to leave their phones unlocked or lax enough to unblock the phone every time the kid asks for it.
It depends on how heavy handed the approach is. A kid could learn about using a vpn or proxy service to bypass dns or dpi based content filtering but if you properly configure the parental controls on iOS or android there is pretty much nothing they are going to be able to do. If they are that determined, I think you need to have a conversation about making good choices themselves and trusting them not to consume harmful content.
I was able to bypass the content filters on the PCs when I was in high school because it was a shitty content filter that could be bypassed by killing the process in an unelevated task manager. My kids are going to have to be more resourceful than that
Don’t all schools ban phones? They were banned when I was in highschool maybe ten years ago. And smartphones were already very much a thing by that point. Everyone still used them because enforcement was basically impossible.
The only teacher I ever saw who had an effective strategy was my math teacher. He told kids to put their phones on their desk at the beginning of class so that they were out in the open. If he found out you had come to class with a phone and didn’t put it on the desk, you’d lose it, even if you weren’t using it. And then he said you could use them for a few seconds to check them, but you had to keep them out in the open. No hiding the phone by your legs.
“Back in my day” (when phones were not that smart but already had color screens and crappy cameras) the teacher would seize your phone if you dared to take it out of your pocket or if it even did as much as vibrate. Not sure why kids would need to check their phone during class nowadays.
That’s how most teachers in my school operated, and it meant people were constantly screwing around on their phones and not paying attention, because it was an unenforceable policy. Like I said, the only teacher I ever had who effectively prevented people from screwing around on their phones excessively was that math teacher.
Was very enforceable at our school. Teachers had eagle eyes, they simply took your phone and if you were lucky they gave it back to you after class, but most of the time you had to come pick it up after school, and if you were a multi-time offender, your parents had to come get it.
I think we’re from the same day. I’m pretty goddamn glad, honestly. I’ve seen how much the phone has invaded my life, and I’m on the lowest scale of intrusion. I typically find myself out with a group of people all on their phones. It feels weird and gross. I could see how that constant attachment could be such a problem for teachers today, even if they were banned. It’s almost automatic, when someone gets bored or distracted, their hand is already in their pocket pulling out the phone.
We had texting, but the smart phone was invented the year I graduated high school. So really even my college years weren’t really tainted by constant phone use. We were really lucky for that reason, I hink.
Because the way we detect and curb abusive teachers is the same way we do abusive police officers, by recording their actions and posting them online.
Back in my day abusive teachers just did their damage, and left my generation with scars. Without publicly-accessible evidence of these events, and consequential pressure on the state, the process just continues.
And then your society teams with intergenerational mental illness, such as what I’m diagnosed with.
Definitely depends on the school and where you live, but in my experience the rules have become really loose. Every kid has a phone and mobile data. They’re banned in class but kids always try to open their phones to check them and hide them quickly anyways. Many kids spend breaks on their phone. Banning kids from coming into school with phones in their first place is what the article means.
My local school has a simple system. Every student is required to place their phones in a clear plastic similar to this - []https://www.amazon.com/Gorilla-Grip-Breathable-Organizer-Accessories/dp/B09MJH9V2V/ref=sr_1_6?crid=1X4FP5L6YX60T&keywords=hanging%2Bshoe%2Bcaddy&sprefix=hanging%2Bshoe%2Bcaddy%2Caps%2C239&sr=8-6&th=1 - hanging right next to the door. The pockets are transparent so the teacher can quickly see if everyone has done so and they are cheap.
Terrible. Imagine how many poo and cum particles live on that nasty-ass thing.
Having lived my whole life in the Information Age, I am 100% in support of this.
Problem with the digital world is it’s all fake, it’s all bullshit. It’s only anything at all because we’re here. But like everything, it comes with a cost.
During the brain formation years, the brain should get opportunity to form both with and without it, so the maximum number of possible capabilities are preserved for future access.
