I’m inclined towards just banning cellphones in schools. For 70% of the students this will be enough to ensure they don’t use one (number made up based on experience of recalcitrant kids in my classes)
> For 70% of the students this will be enough to ensure they don’t use one
Lots of schools ban cellphone use, but students find lots of ways to abuse this rule.
Indeed, when you start to collect phones at the start of class, you find a pretty big share now have burner phones to turn in, so they can still sneak peaks at their phone or take it to the restroom.
Sure, the students I work with don't openly defy (though I hear a lot about this from public school colleagues). They turn in burner phones and then are super sneaky to try and use their real phone during class.
> sneak peaks at their phone or take it to the restroom
on that note why the shit are students permitted to leave the testing area during critical exams (midterms, finals) , ostensibly to use the restroom.
but with phone in pocket, obviously more than a few are googling test answers as well? I've personally witnessed this multiple times over past few years and it makes no sense.
People have, for the past thousand centuries or so, somehow managed to eliminate their waste without carrying an internet-connected pocket supercomputer.
Okay… I’m just saying that restricting access to a lavatory sounds cruel and unusual.
If you meant to say that we can prevent phones from also entering said restroom, then that sounds great. I have my doubts that it’s possible, but I’m fine with that solution in general.
Unless you want prison rules or to counteract decades long policy of not academically punishing protected classes of students you cannot effectively ban Phones in the Public School System.
You often can't seize the device. If the student says no you risk physical escalation. Students are VERY protective of their phone due to the personal content on devices.
You often can't suspend or academically punish the student. There are VERY strong incentives in public school systems not to further bury an underperforming student, minority students, and similar criteria. The student may WANT to be suspended.
Students can easily hide the device, like in their underwear, purse, whatever. Again unless you want prison-level strip searches there really isn't a way around this.
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Honestly I think we'd need state/regulatory/infrastructure level tools to enact a ban policy. Think signal-jammers, vpns on legitimate devices, etc. It would be a massive IT cost to enact. IMO it would be worth it, but I don't think society would bare the cost because too few care about education beyond its function as childcare - we have a entire political party that wants to disband the Department of Education.
That's why owning and operating smart phones should sinply be illegal for children. Where the age limit should be is debatable, but letting as young as 12-year olds have one is an absurd failure for a society.
A ban on cell phones would make doing homework a lot more difficult. It's far easier to have textbooks on your phone than carrying them around all day. Almost impossible to write any kind of paper without the internet.
No the resources you used would have degraded since you were in uni. Since people use the internet, less people are using the library so the library gets less funding, professors aren't checking if the library has enough copies of books, etc. But just culturally unless you've been primarily using non-electronic methods of education; then you are just always worse at doing so.
If I live my regular professional life using stackoverflow, man pages , Wikipedia, Google Scholar, etc. then I become very proficient using those. It doesn't make any sense forcing students to learn research methods they aren't going to use outside the classroom at least not at the expense of prohibiting the de-facto, gold standard of information sharing i.e the internet.
Saying you can learn without a phone/internet is like saying you can travel via horse or find a job via the classified section. Efficient research and learning is a network dependent skill; if other people use X then you need to know X not Y .
It's actually quite convenient, school desks are quite small so trying to fit a textbook and your homework notebook is quite cramped. You can just put your phone directly next to the HW problem.
High schoolers and college students still have good eyes lol.
