At my kid's school phones and all other electronics can't be visible when class starts or ends or the teacher takes it.
I'm ok with that.
Some of the more universal bans I don't get, we should be educating kids on responsible usage, total ban seems like just pushing bad choices down the road.
Even if this is all it’s doing, that’s a win.
Most adults haven’t figured out responsible usage. Down the road, their brains will be more developed. And down the road, the average among them won’t need to learn at the rate we need them to now.
If adults can't manage themselves with phones then down the road makes no difference.
I feel like experience builds good choices and total bans are like just putting blinders on.
My oldest had supervised access to a phone / tablet for a while, when he downloads a game now he takes the game to gauge how much it relies on micro-transactions and so on and passes on it immediately if he thinks it is bad. That only comes form experience, and probably better to learn it when a parent can talk to him about these things rather than later in life when he is blowing his own money.
> At my kid's school phones and all other electronics can't be visible when class starts or ends or the teacher takes it.
All of these articles are so confusing to me because they act like banning smartphones in class is something new. Is this actually new? Were there schools where students weren’t getting in trouble for using phones during class?
The closest thing I’ve seen to an actual ban is a rule that phones must be kept in lockers during the entire school day, including between classes and during lunch. I could see this requiring adjustment for kids.
However I’m baffled by the articles that imply smartphones were not banned from use during class. Was this really ever a thing?
Really it wasn't a new thing at all, just enforced appropriately. Teacher sees electronics (of any kind) and it's taken and you pick it up at the office. Multiple violations and parents get to meet with the staff to talk about it (that's the real kicker).
Yeah it wasn't new, for some reason these articles just never mention that it's really about a "new" policy that means actual enforcement.
This is confirming some of my suspicion.
Smartphone ban articles are trending, so journalists feel pressured to write something about it. They all around to schools and learn about their smartphone policy, then write that as a new-ish thing so they can jump on the trend.
> New York City students are one week into the statewide phone ban.
Yes, this is a new thing.
The first sentence of this article links to information about the ban itself.
Later in the article it summarizes how it is enforced.
> Schools have rolled out a range of strategies, with most schools either collecting phones at arrival and storing them in lockers or distributing magnetic pouches that have to be locked and unlocked at the beginning and end of the day.
Unlikely that phone usage was unlimited in class with no restrictions before the statewide ban.
That kids were ever allowed smartphones to begin with is a regression from the status quo we had not long ago.
That article gives little information that's not in the original one, even clicking through to the article linked in that linked article gives scant details.
Here's the NYC public school district policy:
https://www.schools.nyc.gov/about-us/policies/cell-phone-and...
This is what's covered under the ban:
A personal internet-enabled device is any electronic device not issued by a school or NYCPS program that can connect to the internet, allowing the user to access content online. Examples of these personal devices include:
* Communication Devices, such as cell phones, smartphones, and smartwatches.
* Computing Devices, such as laptops, tablets, and iPads.
* Portable music and entertainment systems, such as MP3 players and game consoles.Adults today can’t manage. That’s a function of the people and context. Adults tomorrow might. Perhaps because we regulate it. Perhaps because they’re exposed to it more carefully.
> probably better to learn it when a parent can talk to him about these things rather than later in life when he is blowing his own money
None of this requires he have a smartphone at school.
That’s what confuses me: Many of these articles are implying that phones were allowed everywhere previously, whereas my understanding was that the previous status quo was that they were only allowed in between classes, at lunch, or before/after school hours.
But in most schools where there aren't really strong bans, what happens is of course you're not supposed to be texting and playing games during class, but the teachers at worst would ask you to put it down. They daren't actually take the phone for myriad reasons:
• Could start a physical altercation
• Parents are going to harangue the teacher about how they "need it" to stay in touch with their kids "for safety" or some long story about some supposed responsibility the kid needs to be reachable for
• Risk of liability (what if another kid steals it while it's in custody)
• End of the day one way or another it'll just be given back, so why waste your effort and risk all of the above for basically nothing.
I think the newer bans may be more about actual school administration support intended to assure teachers and other staff that there will be effective consequences of continual phone abuse, so that it's not pointless to try to enforce no-phone rules.
It was quite the shock when the statewide ban happened. Parents and students alike are still complaining about it.
My recollection is that some kids did try to violate the rule by surreptitiously texting during class, and did sometimes get their phones confiscated by a teacher; and also some people had their phones confiscated because they got a call or text and it went off in class, since they forgot to turn it off or silence the ringer (although sometimes kids were just asked to turn off the phone and didn't have it confiscated).
I personally was not particularly inclined towards rulebreaking (or was smart enough to only break rules I was sure I could get away with), and I wasn't the kind of social butterfly in high school who was constantly texting people anyway, so my own phone never got confiscated. Merely having phones (or other electronic devices) on your person during the school day and using them on campus but outside of class times (e.g. during lunch) wasn't against the rules. I specifically remember playing a lot of the Nokia phone snake game on my phone to pass time during lunch or while waiting to get picked up after school - because it was the only game on the phone that was even mildly interesting.
I think if my school had tried to ban having a cell phone on your person at all during the school day, I would've attempted to evade the ban by hiding it more deeply in my backpack or something. And if there were literal bag inspections in order to mitigate this, I would've been genuinely pretty angry about that and tried to think of something else I could do to evade the ban. Being compelled to put your phone in a locked box during the school day, rather than just silence it and not use it during class, seems very draconian to me.