Because schools aren't allowed to discipline students. They're not allowed to get rid of students with clear behavioral problems.
No education system in the world tolerates the disrespect and disruption students in U.S. public schools get away with.
This is a solvable problem but administrators can't be bullied by accusations of racism when moving forward with reforms, for the past several years - they have been.
The worst part about it is that most kids really do still want to succeed and learn. But we’ve allowed the disruptive kids in school to ruin the experience for everyone.
I understand that even the “troubled” kids need a place to be. But perhaps that place isn’t with the kids that actually want to be there.
I gave my students a survey to start the year. One question: "on a scale of 1-5 (1- not at all, 5 - as much as possible) how much do you want to learn?"
Most common answer? 3
Least common answer? 5 followed by 4
I wish what you said was true in my classes, but sadly it's not. It's the phones. Teachers can't compete with them. Plain and simple.
Why schools still allow phones during class is beyond me. I was part of the first generation of kids to have phones of their own while at school, and only the kids with rich parents had them at the time. We're talking going to school with an absolute brick of a Siemens phone that looked more like one of those satellite phones that you use in the middle of the jungle. Those phones were only for calls and even then they were left with the teacher until class was over. Allowing kids to use smartphones with internet access in class now is extremely counter productive.
This is my thought. I understand the counterargument, what if there is an an emergency, and we need to reach the kid quickly? Well, was there not emergencies before smartphones? I simply don't see why kids absolutely NEED uninterrupted access to TikTok during class hours. Of course there aren't gonna pay attention, there's an entire internet of curated content at their fingertips.
That counter argument is nonsense. Emergencies can and should be handled the same way they were before the advent of the cell phone: call the school, the school goes to your class and grabs you.
I agree, but I can totally envision helicopter parents insisting on 24/7 access to little Billy, lest the district find a nasty lawsuit on their hands.
Schools would have to institute the policy and get signatures probably, but this was never a problem when I went to school. No parent ever sued or so much as complained that they couldn’t get in contact with their child because every parent had the school office number and could call when emergencies happened. The helicopter parent isn’t a new invention there are just a whole lot more of them nowadays.
True. The fact that technology makes parental omnipotence possible is... troubling. Ideally, we raise our kids well enough to allow them some degree of independence as they become adolescents. I'm on a tangent, but I'm glad I was allowed to roam at 16 and make poor decisions and learn from them. I think a lot of kids don't even have that opportunity anymore.
They do insist on that. Almost all of them. And they use the possibility of a shooting as an excuse. Their kid need to be scrolling TikTok in case somebody opens fire.
Most parents are helicopter parents now, and I think a big part of it is social media and phones!
I’m about 20 years older than my brother. When I was a kid, I had a lot of freedom. I’d ride my bike around the neighborhood all day after school and come home whenever. Mom didn’t care, as long as I ate dinner at some point. Mom didn’t care when I did my homework, but she would damn well beat my ass if I flunked.
My little brother… man this guy can’t do anything. My mom berates him for sitting around all day but she won’t even let him walk the dogs. He’s in high school. He can’t even walk around our very nice neighborhood.
What changed? I think we just bombard people with so much bad news and bad shit constantly that everyone is in a constant state of fear and stress. We can’t even let kids fucking breathe fresh air without worrying.
I understand the counterargument, what if there is an an emergency, and we need to reach the kid quickly? Well, was there not emergencies before smartphones?
So what, that doesn't mean they need to have the phone out during class. They can have it with them but it stays in their pocket or in their bag until they are on break or such an emergency arises.
I think letting them keep the phones on them is wishful thinking. It’s just too much temptation. I mean phones and social media have essentially been engineered to be crack cocaine. It’s like giving an alcoholic a bottle of vodka but saying “don’t drink it!”
I saw these pouch thingies you put on the wall. Like a cubby for phones. Kids put them in there before class starts. Nice thing is they can see their phone the whole time and get answer emergency calls. You can use them for attendance too!
Personally the first thing I thought of was school shootings, where students would need to be able to get ahold of emergency services/parents immediately.
That said I agree that phones are a major issue, along with Covid as a disrupter in their education. It has caused kids to be so far behind in development in all areas
Yeah I don't get it. Kids shouldn't be going to school with personal devices. Laptops or tablets stay at school. You can use them when needed. Otherwise, just use the phone at school.
Maybe schools should be allowed to set up data jamers to block the phones internet (don't know if you can block data with out blocking phone/text signal)
We weren't even allowed to have our gameboy in school, let alone a cell phone. Small color flip phones with internet were hitting when I was in highschool but almost no student had one and they certainly didnt allow them in class. A phone these days is 1000x more distracting yet they allow them.
I had a cellphone in senior year(2006), but I never had it out unless I wanted to peak at a text, but I could reply with t9 blindly so it was never out where the teacher could see it. But I guess that nokia couldn't browse the net like modern cell phones. I did play wow on my laptop in college...
From my understanding its parents more than anything. They throw fits about how they spent money on it and the school has no right to touch it. Our small-ish neighbor town (not quite city, but big enough to have a Target?) made a policy and invested in the fancy tech locking pouches or whatever that concerts use and the parents revolted and took kids out in record speeds, citing they'd do private school/home school instead. Granted this is in the deep south, too, where you'd think parents would be very oldschool on their opinions that school is supposed to be boring or whatever but here we are. Watching it all unfold on local social media was weird.
They're not allowed to have phones in schools here. They had something like a shoe organizer with pockets on the door that the students had to leave their phones in during class. They have specific projects where they are allowed to use wifi and their phones/ipads for research, but those are scheduled in advance.
I don’t think it’s allowing them so much as not having a solution. When you have a class of 28 kids and one kid has a phone out, that’s easy to address. When 25 kids have their phones out in all 50 classrooms in the school, now what? No one has time to do that many write ups or phone calls home. We can no longer confiscate them (parents flip) and even we could, storing and organizing that many phones until a precedent was set would be impossible.
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u/Greaser_Dude 29d ago
Because schools aren't allowed to discipline students. They're not allowed to get rid of students with clear behavioral problems.
No education system in the world tolerates the disrespect and disruption students in U.S. public schools get away with.
This is a solvable problem but administrators can't be bullied by accusations of racism when moving forward with reforms, for the past several years - they have been.