4 ms·

I swapped my high school son’s iPhone for an Apple Watch w/cellular for school days and his grades and social life improved significantly.

mh- 2y ago
And here our schools don't allow smart watches, depriving me of this (wise) choice.
- hammock 2y ago
  My school had to ban Tamagotchis back in the day…
- oblio 2y ago
  Can't you just give them a dumb phone? Also, why do parents these days need so much that their kids have some an instant communication device?
  - Mistletoe 2y ago
    At the school by me every day is a line that stretches for blocks of parents picking up their kids at 3pm. All of these cars and human time was previously handled by a school bus and one driver.
    - oblio 2y ago
      Why does this craziness happen?
      - lazide 2y ago
        Because clearly a school bus is too expensive. /s
      - Spooky23 2y ago
        People are paranoid for a variety of reasons about their kids. Also, culturally, parents don’t let kids walk home. When I was a kid in NYC only the kids bussed in from the hood had busses, the rest of us from the local neighborhood walked. State aid only reimburses for trips beyond a certain radius.
      - ssl-3 2y ago
        A few decades ago (before Sir Tim-Berners Lee invented the WWW), I attended a fairly large public elementary school, and it seemed that most of us just walked (or rode bikes) to/from school. Sure, a few kids got rides on most or all days, and many rode a bus (sometimes a school bus, or sometimes a church or YMCA bus that ferried kids off to supervised after-school activities). We might get a ride to school if we were running late in the morning, or get picked up if we had an appointment after school, or if the weather was awful. (And I made sure to have a good look for my grandpa's car every afternoon: Every now and then he'd show up seemingly at random, and we'd go get ice cream.) But at 3:00PM, what broadly happened was that we filtered out onto the quiet sidestreets that bordered the school and [eventually] made our ways home. The daily line of cars was short enough that it didn't take any particular special consideration to manage: Folks just parked on streets that weren't used for lining up school buses and it all seemed to work fine. It worked fine. It seems a bit chaotic in retrospect, but it really was just fine. Nobody got kidnapped or murdered. If we were late getting home it was because we were just out fucking off somewhere being kids. --- Nowadays, I do some work sometimes at much smaller public elementary schools that requires me to take a break when the hallways are flooded with kids, and that gives me opportunities to passively observe what goes on. Every afternoon, rain or shine, a huge organized line of cars appears, on dedicated pavement that did not exist decades ago, and organized individual dismissal of kids into their requisite cars begins. It looks like madness to me. Some cars even show up an hour and a half or more before dismissal, and the drivers seem to remain in the car the entire time -- just waiting. So what changed? To posit a theory: In this particular school system, reorganization didn't help at all. Schools were consolidated, and on average they shrunk (the big school I went to still stands, but it is empty). Due to what I can only presume is complete mismanagement, this lead to a lot of kids needing to go a school that was very far away and required riding the bus instead of just walking home. But also: Parents of school-aged kids these days largely grew up with the Internet, and that made the world seem like a scarier place than it actually is.
      - Thorrez 2y ago
        I seem to recall the bus taking much longer than my mom coming to pick me up. Also my mom wanted to spend more time with me, talking in the car.
      - Mistletoe 2y ago
        I think the reporting of bad things has gotten intense through social media and parents don’t know or realize that we are living in the safest era ever. https://www.statista.com/statistics/191219/reported-violent-crime-rate-in-the-usa-since-1990/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/191219/reported-violent-...
  - chgs 2y ago
    When I was a kid I could phone home from a pay phone. Can’t do that nowadays.
    - AStonesThrow 2y ago
      Once when I was 10, 11 years old, I needed to call home from school. I had never used a payphone. I had perhaps rarely used our rotary home phone to dial out. Of course it was after school hours, and a stressful personal crisis already, and no adult was hovering nearby to explain anything. I figured out how to put in the coins and enter the number on TouchTone, (just like I'd seen on TV) but I didn't know what a dial tone or ring tone sounded like, nor a busy signal, and the line was in use at home, so indeed it was a busy signal that I patiently listened to for several minutes. I believed it was ringing and nobody was picking up. By the time I was 21 and working at my first job, I was promoted and given a cubicle with a phone on the desk. I was quite anxious that it would ring and I wouldn't know what to do with the call. I was working for an Internet provider!
    - nosianu 2y ago
      Now I feel reminded of Monty Python' sketch "The Four Yorkshiremen" - https://youtu.be/DT1mGoLDRbc https://youtu.be/DT1mGoLDRbc Back in my day we didn't even have a phone! 1980s East Germany, many homes did not have a phone. My parents could have gotten one, their job was important enough, but they did not want to be disturbed at home so they never asked for the great privilege of having a home phone.
    - kelnos 2y ago
      While they're at school, they can use the phone in the school's main office to call home if there's an emergency. Smartphones can be left in a locker (or somewhere else inaccessible during the school day) for use on the way to school and home if something happens.
      - singleshot_ 2y ago
        It can be challenging to make your way to the school’s office once the facility has been taken over by an armed gunman, which is a great reason for kids to have comms at all times, if not one that commonly arises.
- newsclues 2y ago
  Ban smart watches but not phones?
  - mh- 2y ago
    They require students to deposit their phones in a storage thing when they enter the classroom.
    - newsclues 2y ago
      That makes sense and seems reasonable
nixpulvis 2y ago
I’ve been saying the Apple watch needs to be advertised as a solution for phones in schools more.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
hed 2y ago
Is it just paired with his phone that he has access to on the weekends? Asking because I've thought about this before (younger kids) but I don't think the AW operates standalone and I didn't want to pair it with my phone.

mh- 2y ago

And here our schools don't allow smart watches, depriving me of this (wise) choice.

hammock 2y ago
My school had to ban Tamagotchis back in the day…
oblio 2y ago
Can't you just give them a dumb phone? Also, why do parents these days need so much that their kids have some an instant communication device?
- Mistletoe 2y ago
  At the school by me every day is a line that stretches for blocks of parents picking up their kids at 3pm. All of these cars and human time was previously handled by a school bus and one driver.
  - oblio 2y ago
    Why does this craziness happen?
    - lazide 2y ago
      Because clearly a school bus is too expensive. /s
    - Spooky23 2y ago
      People are paranoid for a variety of reasons about their kids. Also, culturally, parents don’t let kids walk home. When I was a kid in NYC only the kids bussed in from the hood had busses, the rest of us from the local neighborhood walked. State aid only reimburses for trips beyond a certain radius.
    - ssl-3 2y ago
      A few decades ago (before Sir Tim-Berners Lee invented the WWW), I attended a fairly large public elementary school, and it seemed that most of us just walked (or rode bikes) to/from school. Sure, a few kids got rides on most or all days, and many rode a bus (sometimes a school bus, or sometimes a church or YMCA bus that ferried kids off to supervised after-school activities). We might get a ride to school if we were running late in the morning, or get picked up if we had an appointment after school, or if the weather was awful. (And I made sure to have a good look for my grandpa's car every afternoon: Every now and then he'd show up seemingly at random, and we'd go get ice cream.) But at 3:00PM, what broadly happened was that we filtered out onto the quiet sidestreets that bordered the school and [eventually] made our ways home. The daily line of cars was short enough that it didn't take any particular special consideration to manage: Folks just parked on streets that weren't used for lining up school buses and it all seemed to work fine. It worked fine. It seems a bit chaotic in retrospect, but it really was just fine. Nobody got kidnapped or murdered. If we were late getting home it was because we were just out fucking off somewhere being kids. --- Nowadays, I do some work sometimes at much smaller public elementary schools that requires me to take a break when the hallways are flooded with kids, and that gives me opportunities to passively observe what goes on. Every afternoon, rain or shine, a huge organized line of cars appears, on dedicated pavement that did not exist decades ago, and organized individual dismissal of kids into their requisite cars begins. It looks like madness to me. Some cars even show up an hour and a half or more before dismissal, and the drivers seem to remain in the car the entire time -- just waiting. So what changed? To posit a theory: In this particular school system, reorganization didn't help at all. Schools were consolidated, and on average they shrunk (the big school I went to still stands, but it is empty). Due to what I can only presume is complete mismanagement, this lead to a lot of kids needing to go a school that was very far away and required riding the bus instead of just walking home. But also: Parents of school-aged kids these days largely grew up with the Internet, and that made the world seem like a scarier place than it actually is.
    - Thorrez 2y ago
      I seem to recall the bus taking much longer than my mom coming to pick me up. Also my mom wanted to spend more time with me, talking in the car.
    - Mistletoe 2y ago
      I think the reporting of bad things has gotten intense through social media and parents don’t know or realize that we are living in the safest era ever. https://www.statista.com/statistics/191219/reported-violent-crime-rate-in-the-usa-since-1990/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/191219/reported-violent-...
- chgs 2y ago
  When I was a kid I could phone home from a pay phone. Can’t do that nowadays.
  - AStonesThrow 2y ago
    Once when I was 10, 11 years old, I needed to call home from school. I had never used a payphone. I had perhaps rarely used our rotary home phone to dial out. Of course it was after school hours, and a stressful personal crisis already, and no adult was hovering nearby to explain anything. I figured out how to put in the coins and enter the number on TouchTone, (just like I'd seen on TV) but I didn't know what a dial tone or ring tone sounded like, nor a busy signal, and the line was in use at home, so indeed it was a busy signal that I patiently listened to for several minutes. I believed it was ringing and nobody was picking up. By the time I was 21 and working at my first job, I was promoted and given a cubicle with a phone on the desk. I was quite anxious that it would ring and I wouldn't know what to do with the call. I was working for an Internet provider!
  - nosianu 2y ago
    Now I feel reminded of Monty Python' sketch "The Four Yorkshiremen" - https://youtu.be/DT1mGoLDRbc https://youtu.be/DT1mGoLDRbc Back in my day we didn't even have a phone! 1980s East Germany, many homes did not have a phone. My parents could have gotten one, their job was important enough, but they did not want to be disturbed at home so they never asked for the great privilege of having a home phone.
  - kelnos 2y ago
    While they're at school, they can use the phone in the school's main office to call home if there's an emergency. Smartphones can be left in a locker (or somewhere else inaccessible during the school day) for use on the way to school and home if something happens.
    - singleshot_ 2y ago
      It can be challenging to make your way to the school’s office once the facility has been taken over by an armed gunman, which is a great reason for kids to have comms at all times, if not one that commonly arises.
newsclues 2y ago
Ban smart watches but not phones?
- mh- 2y ago
  They require students to deposit their phones in a storage thing when they enter the classroom.
  - newsclues 2y ago
    That makes sense and seems reasonable

nixpulvis 2y ago

I’ve been saying the Apple watch needs to be advertised as a solution for phones in schools more.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

hed 2y ago

Is it just paired with his phone that he has access to on the weekends? Asking because I've thought about this before (younger kids) but I don't think the AW operates standalone and I didn't want to pair it with my phone.