Speaking as a teacher, the primary things happening here are: 1) remote school taught developing brains that when something is difficult or boring you can just

Speaking as a teacher, the primary things happening here are: 1) remote school taught developing brains that when something is difficult or boring you can just check out and play on your phone. For many, it’s not that they don’t want to learn but that they literally don’t know how. This is something that’s difficult for adults who don’t work with children (and some who do) to wrap their heads around. They aren’t just miniature adults. 2) This is a failure of the school administration to set consistent rules & expectations. If other teachers and school admin don’t enforce a rule, it’s nearly hopeless to try and be the one teacher who does. As an aside, unfortunately it’s really difficult to have worthwhile public conversations about ed policy. It’s like the story of the blind men and the elephant. Everyone’s got their personal experience as students and parents, wrapped up with all kinds of emotions, memories, ego, politics, etc. Comparatively very few have any experience regularly interacting with children who aren’t their own, let alone attempting to teach them.