There are still parents that complain. Turns out they are as addicted to texting with their kids all day as their kids are addicted to the same.
Regardless, it’s great to see that the ban has seemingly nudged things in a healthier direction. Its a failure of leadership that schools needed a statewide ban to make such an obviously positive change.
Though not entirely to blame, parenting is certainly a part of the cell phone addiction problem. Setting time limits and holding kids accountable for breaking rules around phone use would go a long way toward guiding kids toward more healthy behaviors and letting them know someone cares about their well-being.
Modeling constrained phone use is another aspect. Parents will struggle to get their kids off their phones if they are spending all their own free time scrolling, scrolling, scrolling.
When I was in high school, right about the time that cell phones were becoming common among adults but not yet among kids, our school had a blanket policy that all electronics other than calculators and simple watches were to remain in lockers or at home.
Having a CD player, pager, pda, cell phone, or pretty much anything else in class was forbidden. Teachers would take them away and you'd get it back from the principal's office at the end of the day.
I've seen a lot of talk about schools banning phones, but I don't understand why they were ever allowed in the first place.
If you multiply that by 30 kids in a class, conservatively, a teacher could be stuck sitting on 30 confiscated iPhones. That's like half their annual salary in kids claiming they broke their phone. Not to mention any claims that a teacher used a kid's phone for some nefarious purpose.
If that's the claim, I think an appropriate response would be to send the kid out of class (with their precious phone), or home. Can't have them not paying attention in class, and if they are literally a walking liability to discipline in any other way: fine, so be it.
The correct thing to do here is your teachers position is to laugh at the idiot kid telling them about their legal liability.
The school may be taking some on, but if it’s a school policy short of actual gross negligence by the teacher she had none personally.
Even if the school had liability the correct response to such nonsense is to tell the parents to sue them. Most will not, and you defend to the death the few that do so others understand the cost of bringing frivolous lawsuits for silly reasons.
This whole nonsense of entire school systems grinding to a halt and lacking any implementation of common sense due to made up liability fantasies is ridiculous. Let those highly paid admins do their jobs and take on risk.
We treat teachers like second class citizens at our own peril.
I've watched it happen in real time. Administration terrified of totally nonsense complaints and pretending that they just can't take on the "liability" - most of which would be laughed out of court. Bury these people in legal bills if they want to bring such crazy to court. But there is no risk ever taken unless an administrator's career is the one on the line.
Phone breaks in the custody of a teacher and there is not actual evidence of that happening? Too bad. Sue us. No one is suing over a $800 phone unless it turns into a crusade. If the latter happens, put up the strongest legal defense possible and make sure anyone watching understands they are not an easy target for such things. Don't want your phone to "break" while in custody of the school? Easy. Don't bring it to school and violate school policy.
If there were a competent administrator they'd be having parents sign release forms at the start of the school year for the topic. First offense confiscation for the day. Second you get it back on Friday. Third at the end of the school year.
I don't disagree that we treat teachers like shit. They are the equivalent of a retail employee being put in the front line and forced to deal with customer's vitriol due to horrible corporate policies set by do-nothing executives making 20x what they are. I put nearly all the blame on incompetent and downright corrupt administration enabled by equally deeply unserious politicians.
the difference now is that we have things like the magnetic pouches so students physically can’t use them. the rule is the same, but now it’s actually enforceable.
But don't fret: becoming a parent forces you to find strength you didn't know you had. Sounds cliche but there's really no other way to describe it.
Before kids I was glued to my phone. Now when we go to the playground I just stare at the sky like a chimpanzee released after years of indoor captivity.
I see them more as pacifiers for adults.
Whenever I see some adult doomscrolling in public, I hear Maggie Simpson's little suck suck suck sound in my head.
Problem is, many parents are also addicted to their phones, and won't be able to have the discipline to use them this way.
Every app attempts to expand until it is social media. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.
See:
https://techcrunch.com/2024/07/10/spotify-is-no-longer-just-...
https://www.wikihow.com/Hide-Channels-on-WhatsApp (tl;dr there is no way)
https://www.thepearlpost.com/1342/tech/pinterest-is-now-a-so...
https://gearandgrit.com/stravas-evolution-the-journey-from-a...
One of the monumental realizations for me when I became a parent (not necessarily the first day but over the first 5-7 years) was distinctly what my parents did right and wrong. My dad told me on the phone one day that I shouldn't show my child my feelings, that I should hide any negative feelings and only show positive feelings. And now I see that this is what my father did to me and it constrained my ability to share negative feelings with my friends and family, instead leading to me bottling up negative feelings like anger and sadness.I realize that this is not the correct way to parent, your child should see the full range of human emotions from their parents and although you want to be careful to not put too much emotional burden and stress on them to create an anxious child, you want to also be sure they see you at your best and worst. They should see you discuss your feelings with others and with them and when you lose your temper, as we all do, you should also afterwards rationalize what you were feeling with them, apologize if necessary (and it's usually always necessary because there is no need for any human to lose their temper with another human that's been on the Earth for only a few years).
Any way, I think of parenthood as a journey of self-reflection and improvement, much like childhood. Just like some people have a negative painful childhood, parenthood can be similar. The goal for you is to be open and honest with yourself and your growing family, and to be constantly looking for ways to improve.
Apologies if this sounded like a lecture but wish you the best in what may turn out to be the most important job of your life.
This can be tricky if all their friends / school communicates through such mediums as your kids may feel isolated. And yes, many schools promote the use of apps / social media as a shared means of communication for clubs, sports, etc. - which is maddening.
And, as parents, model reading physical books, not your phone.
Speaking as a Dad of two (5 and 2), this is really hard, not because I don't read (I read a lot), but because every time I bring a physical book out the kids start grabbing it, so it's much easier to use my Kindle.
Additionally, I'd probably end up getting divorced if we needed to find space for all the books I read in the house (I've acquired about 1100 books on Kindle over the past ~decade).
After doing this for the last 15+ years, I think it's turned out well. The oldest two seem to have a healthy relationship with their devices (as tools) and are just as happy to put them down and go outside or spend time with other people. The youngest is similar, but still needs to use tech a lot for his studies (by curriculum design). However, he'd also prefer to go outside or watch a movie than be on a device.
I definitely think the scrolling scrolling scrolling has done something negative to society.
This just doesn't hold up - FB ended Q1 2014 with ~1.3bn MAUs. I don't know when I would argue FB exploded beyond colleges but by 2014 it had already happened, long before.
> Facebook was still called The Facebook in 2013 when we were on our 3rd phones.
Facebook dropped the "The" and became "Facebook" in 2005.
I'm prepared to accept an argument that social media has contributed, but these dates don't make any sense.
Most people seem to be in a mass trance with smartphone usage. Everywhere I go, the majority of people I see at any given moment are on their phone. It's spooky. I don't look forward to the inevitable mental health crisis we're going to hit when generations who have always lived with a smartphone hit mid-life.
He didn't. You're the one that brought "solely" into the conversation.
"Teens are sad because they spend all their time on their phones", then maybe ask yourselves why teens flee to their virtual spaces. (maybe look at what seems important to them and is at the same time being dismissed and ignored by the people older than them, while being told not to be idealistic and naive.)
They can't go outside any more - third places (aka, places where one can be without consuming something) are sorely lacking, doubly so for youth who are driven away by "mosquito" teen-repellent devices, and you need to be able to get there without being in danger of getting pulped by a SUV so tall the driver literally cannot see a child.
Oh and parents don't want their kids go out alone lest they be charged with neglect by some HOA busybody snitch siccing CPS on them.
They can't be at school after hours because it's closed or because school is an unsafe place for them (e.g. bullying).
They spend too much time in front of computers, their Boomer parents cry about violent games turning their kids into killers or porn turning them gay.
They can't be on their phones because Boomers cry that they're not doing anything else.
Tell me, what are kids supposed to do? It's like an inverse Schrödinger's cat.
The related issue is parents are overly protective of teens and don't give them enough independence. You see this in a lot of different ways from parents wanting to text their kids, to only letting kids do highly managed structured activities, to treating teens as their best friends, to helicopter parenting protecting kids from all adversity, etc etc
And a similar thing happens not just with parents, but society, there are not a lot of places teens can just hang out. A lot of fun things teens would do increasingly ban minors.
If you want teens off devices, you need to give them alternatives
There's a number of articles about this topic, but I just don't see parents accepting the message: boredom is good for young people. Heck, boredom is why I got into programming my Commodore-64 back in the day - Midwest winters are long and boring as shit, lots of time stuck inside.
- https://youthfirstinc.org/why-its-important-for-your-child-t...
- https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/19/well/family/kids-summer-b...
She was understandably upset and bored for a few days, and then found ways to occupy her time. Not productive ways - but ways that reminded me of what I did as a kid without screens.
20 years ago everyone on suburban trains would be looking at a newspaper, magazine or book throughout their journey. Then they would watch a couple of hours of TV at home. Why is 'looking at a phone' such a problem, when most of the looking replicates those activities, with much of the rest being basic utilities which didn't exist previously - consulting a map, ordering food or shopping, looking up timetables or schedules?
There is no engineered addiction to reading the New York Times, so people just put it down when something else wants their attention.
Looking at a phone is a problem to the extent that it cuts you off from real interactions in society. It is a problem to the extent that the attention you pay to the phone does not go toward solving real problems.
It can be a problem because it allows kids to escape from uncomfortable situations like struggling to learn something, and the Instagram-perfect view of the world makes their own lives feel inferior.
If the problem is games, social media, or porn, why don't we identify those as social problems and try to fix them? Rather than blaming the device.
If we just stuck to the same NY Times articles we would have read in the paper that would be fine. But very few of us have the will power to pick up our device and not wonder into social media apps.
> Looking at a phone is a problem to the extent that it cuts you off from real interactions in society.
Final comment about paper vs digital newspapers: I much prefer paper because the adverts are print-only (no motion/animation) and there are no auto-play videos. It is much less distracting.
Tell that to all the absolute news addicts out there. News is very clearly addicting, just like loot box games.
There's a lot of commentary addicts and such. Cable "news" started this, the internet has magnified it even more. "Screens" wouldn't be the problem if we all used them for mental enrichment, but instead they've been taken over by "engagement"-hunters trying as hard as possible to get you to see just one more ad... and then another one... and another one...
They are repeated many times with slightly different wording to create appearance of many news, since they aren't limited by print.
Some folks did this, others chatted with the 'regulars' that they sat with that had the same schedule as them. There were television series based on this:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Train_48
Some folks didn't want to chat, and in the Toronto-area commuter rail there are designated zones for that:
So it was a weak background distraction at most. Course, different places had different accepted levels of conversation - London tubes aren't chatty - but there's a difference in brain activity, patterns, anxiety, etc sitting in silence with your thoughts vs having the phone constantly trying to get "engagement" with attention-grabbing provocations.
Similarly, watching TV at home was more "background" than "constant binge." The types of shows reflect this - intentionally repetitive, fairly low stakes, things are back to normal at the end of the episode, because most people weren't so hooked that they watched the same stuff every week at the same time.
"Background phone use" is much more conversation-killing.
The secondhand socials are driving me nuts
I had the same experience of meeting people in the same way in Shanghai in 2004 (bus and subway). And before that, in France，the bus line I took near my university was filled with students.
Really struggling to imagine people talking on the subway during their morning commute in Japan!! Culture changes.
My dog stares up at someone until they acknowledge him. Then I end up talking to the person. And everyone has a nice interaction. Usually they get a nice serotonin bump.
I'm pretty sure there's an awful lot more to it.
And the worst part is that that made sense to me for a few days.
Big screen = professional tech person. Small screen = phone addicted loser.
HN tabs open on both.
I've started leaving my phone at home when my wife and I go places together.
It's not a problem without solutions, of course. It just takes an amount of discipline that feels unreasonably burdensome to me (as in "ugh why is this so hard?!").
I'm not certain about that. I remember spending enough breakout time on my iPod that I had to replace the battery.
(Most HN use arguing with strangers is not that. Clearly I'm guilty too.)
Ironically for the "you'll rot your brain" panic of the eighties and nineties, a lot of video games are similarly better. Invest 60 hours into a complicated game and you've worked your brain out MASSIVELY more than 60 hours scrolling or watching tiktok.
Hell, at this point making it through a pre-2000s TV show or movie can be an attention-span challenge. Where's the constant payoff every 30 seconds like with memes??
But yes, I agree. A regular computer offers more "productive" options than a phone. It's just that in my case, I'm an alt-tab away from going back to brain rot, and I am very good at hitting alt-tab.
While not everyone agrees with all the precepts/concepts, may be worth noting the first step:
> 1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelve-step_program
One of the reasons 'God' ("as we understood Him") is invoked because you are admitting that you do not have it with-in you to control things (anymore) and that you need 'something' external to help you clamp down on your behaviour.
5 years free of doom scrolling and never been happier or more productive in my life.
What fun things ban minors? I’m genuinely asking, because I don’t see that around here.
Google "malls that ban teenagers" and you will find a lot of articles. I have been to a few places that have signs "Anyone under 18 must be chaperoned by an adult."
It's so wild looking back at those times. My friends and I would take the bus to the mall, which took (what felt like) forever. And we'd hang out there, browse stores, etc. for HOURS. Even though none of us had any money to spend. Sometimes we'd get a fountain soda at the food court for $.50. it's amazing we'd spend so much time at stores when we had no money.
And in general the US has been really lacking in third places.
So I am empathetic when the kids want Minecraft to be that space since society doesn't give it to them.
I don’t know where you are, but that sounds like a horrible place to raise kids. I’m in a California suburb, and my teenage kids go to the local malls and theaters wi their us all the time - it’s great for their independence and social life.
I tried walking 2-3 miles to school or to a friends and got picked up by the police and brought home, so I stopped going outside and became a homebody nerd. I’m not really surprised it got worse decades later with better entertainment on machines and even worse busybodies outside
I am convinced these skills will benefit a kid more than being good at doom scrolling.
> In my household no one has cell phones
No essential services ever -require- a phone. Just say it is against your unspecified religion and watch them fall over backwards to create alternatives for you.
It is always hilarious to watch someone at a theme park or restaurant produce a paper map or menu just after saying they no longer exist moments earlier.
If I travel overnight my only tech is a tiny laptop to work on the go, but when it is closed it is off, and not able to notify me.
I noticed you mentioned ‘radio’. Do you mean HAM? Like you key up on local 2m repeaters with your HTs? (Our twins got their tech licenses in middle school and we had appointed check-in times during the day).
I applaud you for being in the heart of the tech Beast but not subject to it.
My ADHD is clearly genetic and I’m heavily medicated for it and even still I have difficulty with phone addiction and self control. I would appreciate an environment that aided in this by making tempting things harder to access.
For a long time we were told it was self control causing the issues of weight gain and not changes to the food, diets, and eating patterns. We were told that such problems couldn’t be solved with a magic pill, well for me that magic pill was ozempic and it really did solve 95% of my problems. I had uncontrolled weight gain after taking the Covid vaccine and now 4 years later, two on a rather low dose of ozempic and I’m finally back to normal. I was as disciplined before taking ozempic as I was after so it’s clear that the ozempic had a drastically positive effect.
I think an aversion to empathy leads us to blame people as the cause of their own predicaments, but this blinds us to other causes and fixes. Sometimes it really is the environment.
This is wild to me. When I was growing up, my mom would make sure I didn't sleep through my alarm as she was walking out the door for work. My dad worked shift work in a factory so I would only randomly see him. Usually after the brief morning 'get up!' I wouldn't see either of my parents again until the street lights came on at night and I rushed home to eat. Once I could drive, I had a job after school until ~10PM, so I would go days without seeing my parents. I grew up in the 80s/90s.
I remember leaving notes on the table saying “need $ for X” and I’d find cash there the next day. I needed them but we weren’t each others friends and didn’t need to spend an excessive amount of time together.
The kids who are really abusing their phone have parents who don't care to deal with it and they're not reading the emails. The emails just hassle the parents of the kids who already don't do the bad thing.
Now if they see a phone it's taken and if taken enough times (twice) the parents have to go to the office to retrieve the phone and have a meeting.
Pressure is now on the parents and kids who are the problem.
- old 90s joke
As a teenager I hated how the rule applied during lunch as well, but now I realise it was primarily to get us to physically talk to each other and interact rather than scrolling reddit in the corner. So I'm very thankful we had that rule.
It turns out this is basically 100% of parents in that cohort. Similar with TikTok, finding a parent who says "(endless hours of) TikTok screentime is fine for my kids" without having the same or more screentime themselves is almost impossible.
Their children in school are being distracted and their learning is being hindered.
The parent at work is being distracted and their productivity and focus is being hindered.
It's a lose-lose situation all-round. When I was a kid I managed to get through the school day without looking at my phone (went through during the transition to smartphones, first iPhone).
I can't comprehend where we go from here if people use their phones this much. One of my colleagues probably sacks off 2 hours or so of their working day constantly checking their phone, and it's vibration patterns on the desk distract me working adjacent to them.
What do they talk about?! I would speak to my parents -- in a different country -- once a week by phone, at most, as a kid during term time.
I finished my schooling right as phones were being introduced in the 90s, also in Texas fwiw, but they were so zero-tolerance about any student owned technology all during the 90s (confiscated pagers and cell phones, nobody had laptops yet). Anyways, I never understood how they did a complete 180 only a few years later and students were then allowed to have phones and laptops with them at all times. It seems like they knew this was a bad idea to begin with but somehow lost their will to fight the surge of tech.
I assume you mean that it's a failure of the school's leadership? My kids' school has been applying more strict bans on phones. I wish they would just flat-out ban them -- no more phones in school, period. But even with their moderate ban, there are a lot of parents that push back because "what if there's an emergency and I need to contact my child?" That makes me think that it's probably just easier (to say nothing of broader-impact) for schools to appeal to state lawmakers: just do a statewide ban, then the school doesn't have to fight parents.
State-level regulation provides IMO very necessary cover.
I guess I'm probably preaching to the choir here on HN, but the amount of social woes we are currently experiencing that are indirectly the result of a dramatic increase in social media consumption is a lot higher than I think most people expect.
There are just so many aspects of life that one only really gets nudged into doing at least partially out of boredom, despite ultimately fulfilling so much more. When you can stave off boredom instantly and indefinitely, there are all kinds of experiences that will be substituted.
Some of them are good, while others are cheesy. There are also series I will not admit to having started and given up on when I realized how bad they were. You can thank me later when you realize how much of your life I've just wasted.
I recently heard the comedian Jimmy Carr make an excellent comment about how we as a society think of boredom as a negative, when it's actually a positive: "Boredom is just unacknowledged serenity."
This. People these days talk about boredom like it's the worst thing ever.
i’m a senior in high school in one of those states with new laws about cell phones and electronics. i’m not particularly in favor of these new laws since i’m affected by them firsthand, but i can understand why they were implemented.
a few of my habits have had to change because of these new rules: - i now write my to-do lists on sticky notes instead of on my phone. - i write notes in a small a6 size notebook instead of using a notes app. - i now carry a book and my ipod nano to lunch.
because of these new rules, i do spend more time on my school-provided ipad, however. the school blocks a lot of the websites i typically visit. there are bypasses though — i can easily find instances of redlib if i want to scroll reddit, use a “cookie free youtube watcher” and paste a youtube link if i want to watch a video, and github isn’t blocked, but github pages are. most llm websites are blocked (claude, deepseek, mistral, gemini), but chatgpt isn’t for some reason.
if i want to look at a blocked website that isn’t one of those above, i can use startpage.com’s anonymous view.
i think the days feel longer now without my phone.
oh well, only a few months left anyway.
or maybe you could tell the methods i mentioned to your school it admin friend, just a thought. :3
Fwiw, the article does actually list viable ways of bypassing some of the restrictions
Also keep hacking. Very cool to hear that you found some workable bypasses. Loved beating school IT in my day.
Though what bothers me is all the high schools mentioned are the top prestigious ones you had to apply to, not zoned. Brooklyn Tech, Gramercy Arts, Bronx Science, I'm surprised no comments from Stuyvesant students.
> Alia Soliman, a senior at Bronx Science, said cards “are making a big comeback.” She said kids are playing poker when they’re done with their work in some classes.
Ha! When I was in NYC high school in the 90s we were not allowed to have playing cards or dominoes. The staff would confiscate them because it was believed to encourage gambling. Quite amusing that now they are the saving a generation of kids from mindless scrolling.
Playing poker with friends is at worst zero-sum with limited downside; your friends will probably cut you off when you run out of money and the money stays in your little pool. Betting sports against a faceless profit-maximizing corporation is negative-sum and if it turns into a problem for they're happy to raise your minimum and encourage dumber bets.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
That kids were ever allowed smartphones to begin with is a regression from the status quo we had not long ago.
Unlikely that phone usage was unlimited in class with no restrictions before the statewide ban.
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.
It was quite the shock when the statewide ban happened. Parents and students alike are still complaining about it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.I just posted a talk by Seymour Papert from 1991 where he said that kids were on computers or Nintendo for 6 hours at a time, which surprised me that even then they were "addictive." He notes that poetry, music, Shakespeare aren't "addictive" in the same way.
I'm optimistic that there will be balance in the future. If Thomson is right that smartphones weren't really the beginning of detachment from society but instead it started more around the television era, it requires us to think how to handle all modern technology to optimize overall well being.
He doesn't make any claim as to the addictiveness of poetry, music, or Shakespeare: he pointed out that we use different language to describe childhood compulsions for one activity than we do for another.
My own anecdotal experience on the topic is that I was such a voracious reader as a child that it was a problem in much the same way I see people today complain about kids in screens. I'd hide personal books behind textbooks while I ignored classes, hide under the covers with a flashlight to stay up all night reading, the works.
In my day in the US midwest, it was Euchre.
- an adult phone addict
I suspect there is something to the refrain that phones are a crutch in those cases where our range of actions is constrained. Through habit they then reflexively take over in other contexts.
Probably having more of a "village" to help (grandparents especially) would relieve pressure. Also, multiple kids will engage with each other more instead of looking to parents for all social stimulation as only-children.
I would insist any kid of mine be allowed to use open source tools that can be studied and improved, or nothing at all.
Not everyone wants to read an article to even find out the location they are talking about or if this is relevant to them... otherwise what's the point of titles and headlines?
We can write much better post titles than this.
From burner phones to decks of cards: NYC teens are adjusting to the smartphone banCome on people, read.
> 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.
From the guidelines: “…please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.”
(I’ve flagged. Happy to unflag once title is fixed.)
People from all over the world read this site and many won't click on articles they aren't sure are relevant to them... why can't we put even the location of the story in the title? Is that too much to ask?