6 ms·

Teacher Did All He Could to Keep Kids Off Phones. He's Quitting in Frustration

26 points by lxm 2y ago

throwaway5959 2y ago
Do these kids just not have parents? Are teachers unable to get parents to require their kids leave their phones at home? When I was in high school we had Nokia phones that did basically nothing but calls and snake.
- toomuchtodo 2y ago
  Parents (many uninvolved, many demanding and unrealistic) and administrators (kowtowing to parents) grind teachers down until they leave. I recommend no one be a teacher in the US. It’s mostly daycare for those who can’t homeschool or private school, for whatever reason. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40053774 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40053774 (Search “parents” in r/teachers on Reddit for more, being a teacher in the US is a shit show; I have helped more than one teacher switch careers to save them from public education)
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - rdtsc 2y ago
    For all the rhetoric about saving our children, the best for the children, etc, it comes to putting it into action, we do the opposite: no respect, low compensation, sending kids to school without any manners or respect towards the teachers. Administrators are no better. They change policies year to year, more paperwork, more training needed, more rules. A lot of them have never been a teacher even.
    - benprone 2y ago
      [dead]
jmathai 2y ago
I am so surprised that many parents are supportive of their kids having phones in school with the sole reason being communication in case of an emergency. How do we expect kids to pay attention or be productive with a smartphone in their pocket? We are setting them up for failure - and by us I mean parents and school administrators who support kids having phones in class. Teachers are not in a position to change this.
- Aerroon 2y ago
  I don't understand the problem. Of course kids should have their phones at school! But that doesn't mean that they should be allowed to use them during class. If kids are using their phone during class then you either confiscate the phone or kick the student out of the class. If they do it during a test you mark them down as cheating and fail them. >How do we expect kids to pay attention or be productive with a smartphone in their pocket? I think this is setting them up for the future, because in the future they are going to have a smartphone in their pocket at all times. They're going to have to learn to handle that eventually. But in the pocket doesn't mean in hand. Outside of class time though? It's nobody else's business what they do.
  - floor2 2y ago
    In the future those kids are also going to have the ability to buy alcohol, tobacco, junk food, weapons, motorcycles, fireworks, etc. It's looking more and more like we should be putting phones into a similar category. Children should likely be more protected against the harms of phones until they have developed more to have a greater ability to use them safely.
    - Aerroon 2y ago
      >alcohol, tobacco, junk food, weapons, motorcycles, fireworks, etc. All of these, except junk food, are banned in some place or another by power-tripping governments. Although they are working on the junk food part. Is the implication to get phones banned altogether? >Children should likely be more protected against the harms of phones until they have developed more to have a greater ability to use them safely. It's funny that nobody seems to be able to point out what this unsafe thing is that they're being protected from. All you get are social science studies during the replication crisis in one of the sloppiest sciences we have and it's protected by moralizing. I don't see anything concrete in the harm that people are talking about that rivals things like traffic accidents (kids play outside more = more victims of traffic), general injuries (swimming, falls etc) etc. This all just sounds like the old "don't sit too close to the TV, it will ruin your eyes" or "d&d is satanic" that we were scared with as kids.
rascul 2y ago
When I was in school phones would have been confiscated and it would take a parent to get it back.
PebblesHD 2y ago
I’m still very confused why this has become such a thing recently. I was in senior year a decade ago and we had iPhones back then too. iPods and tamagotchis too. If the teacher needed to deal with a student on their phone rather than working, they’d confiscate it. Most of us left them in our pockets, and seem to have graduated just fine. Why have kids seemingly become unable to leave their phones silently in their pockets, and why have teachers seemingly become unable to confiscate them when needed? Is social media these days that addicting? Are teachers exposed to consequences for managing their classrooms? Anyway, as a student I would have been reluctant to leave my phone at home when I’d demonstrated my ability to not fiddle with it in class, so for many ‘normal’ students I can see why they’d push back.
- phantomathkg 2y ago
  Read this as a general feeling of someone in 40s without kids and consume news from multiple countries. This things happened gradually. At your days the smart phone is still at its infancy where social media are probably text based and at most image based. Nowadays, the social media are a mix of text and videos and probably the quantity of short video the youth consume are far more than the text consume. The phone itself also becoming the extension of our brain (not only youth). And this brings two consequences. - Many feels that there's no need to learn the basic. The wisdom they had, together with the reasoning given by the tools are enough. - The youth also prefer shorter content than long form content. They don't even have the patience to sit through a 30 minute youtube video and prefer a whole story unfolded in a few minutes that fit in tiktok, youtube short or similar. Combining these two means that a lot of the students in this generation will not have the patience to go through a 40 min - 1 hr classroom section/lecture. Also as other have commented in a different thread, the parents of this generation simply does not side with the teacher, and this happens in many countries as well.
  - PebblesHD 2y ago
    The shorter attention span idea is an interesting perspective on this. I’d have thought fidget toys like electronic pets etc. might have the same effect of inducing attention diverting behaviours but as you said, my experience of Facebook/Snapchat at the time was mostly static images. There was video on Facebook and to be fair we watched a lot thanks to many Australian phone plans zero rating data for Facebook but we didn’t do that during class. I still think of myself as a ‘digital native’, as in this technology has existed my whole life, but in many ways yeah I agree with your perspective that it was not as pervasive during my formative years and I guess that makes all the difference here.
dyauspitr 2y ago
Ban smart phones for everyone under the age of atleast 16, but ideally under 18. I would be in support of using tax payer money to provide each public school kid with a dumb phone that can only be used to make basic calls and text messaging. That’s all you’re allowed to have in the classroom. inb4 “it’s going to be used for mass surveillance” - it doesn’t matter.
- adastra22 2y ago
  Why do they even need that in the classroom?
  - flyingspaceship 2y ago
    To appease parents who insist there's a safety violation going on because their kids can't call them if there's an emergency.
    - adastra22 2y ago
      What safety violation would be possible, inside the classroom? Fights in the hall, ok, but they could keep the phone on their backpack. But inside the classroom with the teacher present?
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
RedStarComrade 2y ago
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/careersandeducation/a-teacher-did-all-he-could-to-keep-kids-off-phones-he-s-quitting-in-frustration/ar-BB1mCJ5q https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/careersandeducation/a-teache...
Elfener 2y ago
I'm in school and all my classmates complain that they have to study in their free time. Despite apparently studying even at night, most have worse grades than me. I don't study outside school time, instead I actually pay attention in class and have my phone in my bag. I don't understand my generation.
- antifa 2y ago
  Ignoring all the psychologists and engineers being paid 6 figure salary to siphon your peers attention to sell ads, I wouldn't be surprised if your peers had several undiagnosed and easily accommodated attention disorders their parents don't believe in.
- flyingspaceship 2y ago
  I imagine they don't study at all however devote very large blocks of time to studying which they spend mostly distracting themselves and never working. I go to cafes every day. It has been a long time since I've seen a study group of youth doing work. They are mostly talking or distracting themselves. Even when they stop talking and appear to work, eventually they pick up talking again and you can tell they've been looming over the conversation topics in their heads the entire time. They simply don't think studying or learning is cool and are more interested in gossip.
  - devilbunny 2y ago
    > don't think studying or learning is cool and are more interested in gossip I mean, at a certain level, that's just being a teenager. Most never cared that much about grades or studying. A group of us that had all played football together in high school got together a few years ago when two of our number died - one was expected (he had long been in ill health), the other murdered in very strange circumstances. Anyway, we're all sitting around telling stories, and I mentioned a few things some of the more academic among us had done. One of the others, who was a pretty average student, said, "man, I always figured you guys in the honors classes just studied and such, sounds like I missed out on some damn funny stories." Thing was that I almost never did homework or studied at home - I used my downtime during the school day to get that done so I could play Civilization when I got home.
0dayz 2y ago
I genuinely believe that if we want kids to have some normalcy here we need to flat out ban smartphone for kids up to say 16-18 years old and instead dumb phones should be the norm instead. Because it's not just social media, it's the entire 24/7 jumping around different apps all the time that is screwing them up. Before kids would get bored playing video games and then instead wanting to go out and play. Now it's going from one app to another once they are bored.
- tuumi 2y ago
  I think most people would agree, but problem is enforcement. I worked 20 years in a low SES school where education was less valued. What do you do when you try to take the phone and they refuse? Suspend them? Sure. Then they come back and do it again. Then the state does an analysis and you have to explain that there is a significant number of students missing school because of a phone? They talk to you like it's ridiculous. Kids need to be in school. If you can solve the "what to do if they don't put it away" problem you'd be a hero in education.
  - 0dayz 2y ago
    A simple fine to the parents should be sufficient.
    - tuumi 2y ago
      And if they don't pay?
more_corn 2y ago
Don’t some teachers have a phone pouch board they use to take attendance? Phone in pouch you’re here. Phone missing you’re marked absent.

26 points by lxm 2y ago

Do these kids just not have parents? Are teachers unable to get parents to require their kids leave their phones at home? When I was in high school we had Nokia phones that did basically nothing but calls and snake.

toomuchtodo 2y ago
Parents (many uninvolved, many demanding and unrealistic) and administrators (kowtowing to parents) grind teachers down until they leave. I recommend no one be a teacher in the US. It’s mostly daycare for those who can’t homeschool or private school, for whatever reason. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40053774 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40053774 (Search “parents” in r/teachers on Reddit for more, being a teacher in the US is a shit show; I have helped more than one teacher switch careers to save them from public education)
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- rdtsc 2y ago
  For all the rhetoric about saving our children, the best for the children, etc, it comes to putting it into action, we do the opposite: no respect, low compensation, sending kids to school without any manners or respect towards the teachers. Administrators are no better. They change policies year to year, more paperwork, more training needed, more rules. A lot of them have never been a teacher even.
  - benprone 2y ago
    [dead]

jmathai 2y ago

I am so surprised that many parents are supportive of their kids having phones in school with the sole reason being communication in case of an emergency. How do we expect kids to pay attention or be productive with a smartphone in their pocket? We are setting them up for failure - and by us I mean parents and school administrators who support kids having phones in class. Teachers are not in a position to change this.

Aerroon 2y ago
I don't understand the problem. Of course kids should have their phones at school! But that doesn't mean that they should be allowed to use them during class. If kids are using their phone during class then you either confiscate the phone or kick the student out of the class. If they do it during a test you mark them down as cheating and fail them. >How do we expect kids to pay attention or be productive with a smartphone in their pocket? I think this is setting them up for the future, because in the future they are going to have a smartphone in their pocket at all times. They're going to have to learn to handle that eventually. But in the pocket doesn't mean in hand. Outside of class time though? It's nobody else's business what they do.
- floor2 2y ago
  In the future those kids are also going to have the ability to buy alcohol, tobacco, junk food, weapons, motorcycles, fireworks, etc. It's looking more and more like we should be putting phones into a similar category. Children should likely be more protected against the harms of phones until they have developed more to have a greater ability to use them safely.
  - Aerroon 2y ago
    >alcohol, tobacco, junk food, weapons, motorcycles, fireworks, etc. All of these, except junk food, are banned in some place or another by power-tripping governments. Although they are working on the junk food part. Is the implication to get phones banned altogether? >Children should likely be more protected against the harms of phones until they have developed more to have a greater ability to use them safely. It's funny that nobody seems to be able to point out what this unsafe thing is that they're being protected from. All you get are social science studies during the replication crisis in one of the sloppiest sciences we have and it's protected by moralizing. I don't see anything concrete in the harm that people are talking about that rivals things like traffic accidents (kids play outside more = more victims of traffic), general injuries (swimming, falls etc) etc. This all just sounds like the old "don't sit too close to the TV, it will ruin your eyes" or "d&d is satanic" that we were scared with as kids.

rascul 2y ago

When I was in school phones would have been confiscated and it would take a parent to get it back.

PebblesHD 2y ago

I’m still very confused why this has become such a thing recently. I was in senior year a decade ago and we had iPhones back then too. iPods and tamagotchis too. If the teacher needed to deal with a student on their phone rather than working, they’d confiscate it. Most of us left them in our pockets, and seem to have graduated just fine. Why have kids seemingly become unable to leave their phones silently in their pockets, and why have teachers seemingly become unable to confiscate them when needed? Is social media these days that addicting? Are teachers exposed to consequences for managing their classrooms? Anyway, as a student I would have been reluctant to leave my phone at home when I’d demonstrated my ability to not fiddle with it in class, so for many ‘normal’ students I can see why they’d push back.

phantomathkg 2y ago
Read this as a general feeling of someone in 40s without kids and consume news from multiple countries. This things happened gradually. At your days the smart phone is still at its infancy where social media are probably text based and at most image based. Nowadays, the social media are a mix of text and videos and probably the quantity of short video the youth consume are far more than the text consume. The phone itself also becoming the extension of our brain (not only youth). And this brings two consequences. - Many feels that there's no need to learn the basic. The wisdom they had, together with the reasoning given by the tools are enough. - The youth also prefer shorter content than long form content. They don't even have the patience to sit through a 30 minute youtube video and prefer a whole story unfolded in a few minutes that fit in tiktok, youtube short or similar. Combining these two means that a lot of the students in this generation will not have the patience to go through a 40 min - 1 hr classroom section/lecture. Also as other have commented in a different thread, the parents of this generation simply does not side with the teacher, and this happens in many countries as well.
- PebblesHD 2y ago
  The shorter attention span idea is an interesting perspective on this. I’d have thought fidget toys like electronic pets etc. might have the same effect of inducing attention diverting behaviours but as you said, my experience of Facebook/Snapchat at the time was mostly static images. There was video on Facebook and to be fair we watched a lot thanks to many Australian phone plans zero rating data for Facebook but we didn’t do that during class. I still think of myself as a ‘digital native’, as in this technology has existed my whole life, but in many ways yeah I agree with your perspective that it was not as pervasive during my formative years and I guess that makes all the difference here.

dyauspitr 2y ago

Ban smart phones for everyone under the age of atleast 16, but ideally under 18. I would be in support of using tax payer money to provide each public school kid with a dumb phone that can only be used to make basic calls and text messaging. That’s all you’re allowed to have in the classroom. inb4 “it’s going to be used for mass surveillance” - it doesn’t matter.

adastra22 2y ago
Why do they even need that in the classroom?
- flyingspaceship 2y ago
  To appease parents who insist there's a safety violation going on because their kids can't call them if there's an emergency.
  - adastra22 2y ago
    What safety violation would be possible, inside the classroom? Fights in the hall, ok, but they could keep the phone on their backpack. But inside the classroom with the teacher present?

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

RedStarComrade 2y ago

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/careersandeducation/a-teacher-did-all-he-could-to-keep-kids-off-phones-he-s-quitting-in-frustration/ar-BB1mCJ5q https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/careersandeducation/a-teache...

Elfener 2y ago

I'm in school and all my classmates complain that they have to study in their free time. Despite apparently studying even at night, most have worse grades than me. I don't study outside school time, instead I actually pay attention in class and have my phone in my bag. I don't understand my generation.

antifa 2y ago
Ignoring all the psychologists and engineers being paid 6 figure salary to siphon your peers attention to sell ads, I wouldn't be surprised if your peers had several undiagnosed and easily accommodated attention disorders their parents don't believe in.
flyingspaceship 2y ago
I imagine they don't study at all however devote very large blocks of time to studying which they spend mostly distracting themselves and never working. I go to cafes every day. It has been a long time since I've seen a study group of youth doing work. They are mostly talking or distracting themselves. Even when they stop talking and appear to work, eventually they pick up talking again and you can tell they've been looming over the conversation topics in their heads the entire time. They simply don't think studying or learning is cool and are more interested in gossip.
- devilbunny 2y ago
  > don't think studying or learning is cool and are more interested in gossip I mean, at a certain level, that's just being a teenager. Most never cared that much about grades or studying. A group of us that had all played football together in high school got together a few years ago when two of our number died - one was expected (he had long been in ill health), the other murdered in very strange circumstances. Anyway, we're all sitting around telling stories, and I mentioned a few things some of the more academic among us had done. One of the others, who was a pretty average student, said, "man, I always figured you guys in the honors classes just studied and such, sounds like I missed out on some damn funny stories." Thing was that I almost never did homework or studied at home - I used my downtime during the school day to get that done so I could play Civilization when I got home.

0dayz 2y ago

I genuinely believe that if we want kids to have some normalcy here we need to flat out ban smartphone for kids up to say 16-18 years old and instead dumb phones should be the norm instead. Because it's not just social media, it's the entire 24/7 jumping around different apps all the time that is screwing them up. Before kids would get bored playing video games and then instead wanting to go out and play. Now it's going from one app to another once they are bored.

tuumi 2y ago
I think most people would agree, but problem is enforcement. I worked 20 years in a low SES school where education was less valued. What do you do when you try to take the phone and they refuse? Suspend them? Sure. Then they come back and do it again. Then the state does an analysis and you have to explain that there is a significant number of students missing school because of a phone? They talk to you like it's ridiculous. Kids need to be in school. If you can solve the "what to do if they don't put it away" problem you'd be a hero in education.
- 0dayz 2y ago
  A simple fine to the parents should be sufficient.
  - tuumi 2y ago
    And if they don't pay?

more_corn 2y ago

Don’t some teachers have a phone pouch board they use to take attendance? Phone in pouch you’re here. Phone missing you’re marked absent.