School will never be as interesting as a phone. Your teacher will never be as entertaining as an influencer. Your textbooks will never be as entertaining as your feed. What families and teenagers have to understand is that education is a choice. If you want to learn, you’ll probably have to put your phone down for long periods of time to actively listen and learn. It’s difficult. It tires you out. It’ll frustrate you. But you will eventually learn.
Then again - when I look at home prices and inflation, I understand young people’s feelings of futility.
Good luck young people. I’m really rooting for you to figure this out.
45It's always rude to not listen. So phones should not be allowed during class.
However, It's rude not to allow breaks, growth, emergencies, and the fact that they are in fact, kids. They should be allowed to socialize, enjoy youth, and understand hierarchy/respect. So to earn respect, you must respect first.
Let the kids have their phones/computers as that is the modern world we live in. They will have technology. Don't discourage it just because some people learned "you won't always have a calculator in your pocket". Well, now you do, so rather than ban it, teach them to USE IT!!! Just... properly.
Adapt the teaching, not the class.
36I don't think it's particularly unreasonable to conclude that any decent approach to the first will also include the second.
32Not 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
23Multiple studies have shown that smartphone decrease concentration, and have negative impact on emotional well being in adolescents.
The mere presence of a smartphone reduces basal attentional performance https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-36256-4
Brain Drain: The Mere Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/691462
Attention or Distraction? The Impact of Mobile Phone on Users' Psychological Well-Being https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8093572/
Mobile phone use, behavioural problems and concentration capacity in adolescents: A prospective study https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1438463916300645
15How 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?
15Even before phones schools were like this. But they'd just put you in mandatory extra classes to fix your grades. Instead of, you know, talking to you. To get to know how you are doing and how you're feeling.
I've hated my school time and all it taught me is teachers are obsessed with having power over others. Maybe not all teachers, but a lot are like this. They won't listen to you, they just force their opinion on you. And if you don't do well in their pre-made lecturing framework then it's on you because you don't pay attention and you are lazy. It's never on them.
8I think addressing low motivation levels is beyond the scope of the school's ability to affect things. When I was in high school I remember not caring about much of anything because I was convinced that even though I was almost certainly going to college, I would still just end up in a 'passionless bullshit make-work dead end job' like my parents, working long hours just to eke out a meager living, enough to keep getting back in the goddamn hamster wheel, and that really sapped my will to do anything productive. I ended up being completely right but I'm lucky enough to be living in this era of realization that work in the states is inherently bullshit, and that I make enough money to pursue passions outside of my 8-6.
6Next level update your /etc/hosts to point time wasting websites to localhost
6Oh no, school sucks.
6American 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?!?!"
5i do have some sympathy for teachers taking phones away because I had one class in school where a kid would play that noise outside the frequency adults can hear really loudly the whole time on his phone.
Also memes and texting friends are always going to win out over algebra and english class if they are an option right there
4Phones certainly decrease our level of motivation by decreasing our dopamine baseline. Huberman Labs episodes addressing dopamine are really interesting
3yeah, too many school authorities do act taht way. For a approach going more in the opposite direction, see, for example: https://piped.video/watch?v=dk60sYrU2RU (maybe skip to aa minute in. presented, the idea, in that case, by sugata mitra. The Talk is not new, but still relevant I'd think, and relates to the post here. ) 💻🖥️
For anotger, similar, but also different example, see https://piped.video/watch?v=WNuv0_MLrKg this one specifically mentions phones early on, too.
So if you believe in, or are open to the idea, that the approach in in the main meme post isn't the best, then the stories in the piped videos might be of some intrest to you.
tdlr: 🎶you can use your phone if yiu want to, yiu can leave your technophobe schoolmaster behind,... 🎶🎧
1In classrooms children shouldn't remove their phones from their pockets at all, they are there to focus on the class. If we removed our phones from our pockets, they would be confiscated until the end of class, and rightly so.
School is for paying attention and learning, not for going into your own little world on your phone (which we're all guilty of).
Also, the only time you need to use a computer at school is during IT lessons, or study/research sessions. School is the time that we learn and perfect our handwriting abilities, and our abilities to read through books, make notes based on what the teacher is saying, or writing on the blackboard, etc. It is not appropriate to pull out a laptop and use that instead, because that won't teach the child these important hand skills.
I'm talking about primary school and secondary school, and mostly college too. Once the student is 18 and begins university, there's nothing stopping them from using computers or phones, it's up to them to regulate their own attention and such.
I think that's all pretty reasonable and fair.
1to answer your question, there is no reason other than america's fetishization of the protestant work ethic.
schools don't need to be a joyless labor camp. you already have to wake up far too early and be there all day, can't you at least be on your phone? maybe give kids a break? everyone has stress in their lives, my anxiety started in 5th grade, maybe i don't have the mental capacity for 7 fucking classes today and i check out after 5. just like no honest person pays full rapt attention every minute of their jobs.
in college you can basically be on your phone during class and i remember just as much from college as i do grade school. either way, you have to study for the exams. if you aren't gonna pay attention, there are plenty of ways to do so. being forced to listen doesn't necessarily increase absorption.
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