One of the concessions of all education is that nobody is ever fully-engaged. If you are teaching more than 1 person something, then you are dividing your attention between multiple students and hoping they understand well enough to continue. Busywork is even worse; you're just handing kids a set of guidelines and hoping they can intuit the right answer when you grade it.
It feels obvious why phones dominate this environment. If you had a 1:1 teacher/student ratio, nobody would be compelled to distract themselves because the learning is paced for them, not the average of the whole. There's time to catch up on Instagram because roll-call only requires you to answer once. There's time to check Twitter since you finished your test early. The number of places where kids are expected to simply do nothing is absurd - of course they're distracting themselves. I read Treasure Island during my mandatory poetry class, is that a reason to confiscate fiction novels from school premises for their distracting and addicting nature too? The problem is with how we teach.
Is it really so bad for human brains to just "be" without needing constant distraction? Is it possible that a constant need for distraction is actually contributing to things like ADHD? It seems generally accepted that less distraction is a good thing. And is a novel anywhere close to as addictive and distracting as a magic rectangle that can show you basically anything you want to see at the tap of a screen?
It kind of is. Lectures are mostly boring, engaging lecturers are rare. I was better off practicing problem sets than listening to the teacher, essentially generating my own busy work (but kids are diverse, what worked for one might not for the other).
My seven year old get lots of choice time these days in his school. Maybe things are getting better. On the other hand, he finds math too easy, and the only homework he has is what his Saturday Chinese school assigns (daily!).
Doing problem sets seems... more useful to a human brain's development than the mere distraction of social media, no? Schooling can definitely be improved (I personally hated school) but that seems like an orthogonal concern to the harma of constant distraction.
I'm not sure who you're arguing with since I didnt make any claims like the one you're refuting. Unless this is a pithy way of asserting (on a hunch) that there is no harm caused by constant distraction (in which case, you should have just said that).
That doesn't excuse it. Excellence demands the persistent striving for what's difficult rather than surrender. If it means dressing up in a penguin suit or taking up comedy, more power to the teachers who are able to reach students through all manner of cool unreasonableness.
Here's hoping you're right. I've had some excellent teachers throughout the years, the real rare-odd Bill Nye types with a passion for practical science and tactile learning. Even though I loved their class, the subject matter and most of the content, I was a tired kid. I'd get yelled at for reading books and dozing off because public school is exhausting, and no matter how you cut it it's still 6-7 hours of mandatory education.
I'd like to think that mixing enough sugar with the medicine helps it go down for everyone. But I also think it's difficult to make a one-size-fits-all lesson plan for more than 1 person; everyone learns differently, and I don't blame teachers for struggling to discover a teaching methodology that works for everyone. It's a tough problem.
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.
I'm in my 50s. I've been online since I was a teenager.
In the last few years I found that I have to work places where I cannot connect. No wifi, no smartphone, no hotspot. Otherwise I check out and play on the internet.
If you look around, you'll see plenty of adults who, as soon as something gets boring, pull out their phone.
Correction: for many of those adults the phone is always in their hand; it does not need to be pulled out.
I find some of these stories astonishing. When I was in school ~15 years ago, if the teacher caught you using your phone in class he didn't "ask" you to give it to him, nor did he deduct "participation points", whatever that means. He just confiscated the device, and you'd be lucky to get it back within a week. Rules were rules.
Also this teacher is complaining about students putting their headphones on during class? What? That kind of behaviour was unthinkable in my school. If I had done that I would have gotten in serious trouble.
If the teacher says 'okay I' m confiscating the phone' and stretches out his hand but the kid just puts the phone back in their pocket, what do you want the teacher to do?
Give the kid a detention? Send them to the principal? Use one of the other disciplinary tools that the teacher has available?
It's a school. The adults have authority over the children. If there's really no way to enforce the rules or punish bad behaviour, the entire institution is a joke.
I dunno, man. I get the frustration, but part of me also feels like this guy is banging his against against a cultural change and just giving up. Rock music. Cable TV. Video games. The Internet. iPhones. Every generation has that thing their parents generation think is ruining them.
I have a hard time believing he can’t simply ban their active use in class. If he can’t for some bureaucratic reason, then maybe he needs to figure out how to get educational value out of the situation. Have them do TikTok videos explaining biology topics. Who knows. Times are changing. Gotta change with them…
exactly - they didnt interrupt the classes/studends; and ones that tried to have ear-buds in were caught and told no.
even at university some classes were "laptopless" which was striking to me. at a uni an individual "wants" to go and learn - and therefore should hopefully be able to control how they learn (albeit some folks could distract others with non-coursework videos playing).
the challenge now is the younger generations bring laptops/phones into class and works with them daily as part of their toolset (at least the laptop part)
might be great idea to learn off a laptop, but there will be consequences; reminds me of the drafting classes i took: drafting on a sheet with paper/pencil the kids messed around significantly less than when in front of computers when using autocad
i can see it being more difficult of a problem now though, and i would think that all except a few classes should be device-less; esp for younger generation where they likely dont yet know about how they learn themselves - but im no expert. id gamble there are many parents out there that let their younger-and-younger kids do anything on a phone/pc without oversight. too many people think having a 'phone' is a safty feature and cannot live without it - personally im delighted to not have mine constantly attached to me
All four of those things were present in my classroom experience, and I’m an 80s-90s kid. They were just in their proper place. I’m obviously not advocating for kids just totally tuning out and fucking with their phones all day.
Schools can use passive Faraday walls/floors/ceilings. Metal fly screen works quite well. Common aluminum extruded windows, work fine. The brick needs to be shielded, and aluminium foil inserted as an inner layer is very good. In effect a metal 'balloon' has to be erected so all RF is blocked. I have seen very good shielded enclosures with transparent Faraday windows(not screens) that would use the same clear shielding layer. Quite good stuff, I have used a few of them. Screen is cheap and OK for cellular, but if you want 500+ Ghz blocked, screen is not good enough.
Read about it here (no connection to me at all)https://jretest.com/
It is easy and cheap to build a faraday plane in the construction phase, with a layer of screen/foil made where needed, at a fairly low cost.
I see many cases of exam cheating that could be Faradayed out of existence by a wooden frame screen room set up for the exam at whatever size needed. No jamming or emission interruption that would break FCC laws.
In fact the cheaters are breaking more laws and I can suggest a few RFI 'sniffers' like this from JREtest would find emitters. https://jretest.com/product/jre-sta-1/ At $550 a school could buy one for each invigilator to use to detect cheats as each one will last 10 years or so so the cost per exam approaches zero.
A little chat with the owner of JREtest might find he can sense a market and he can work with a school to find the optimal build for that task, because there is a global market for a few hundred thousand RFI Turko-Sniffers every year...
There is a continuum of cheating, spot responses as a quizzed student is sent an SMS answer and tries to see it without being spotted. At the other extreme is the formalised exam/test where a similar set of opposed data/cheats are at play. In many end cases are the open book exams where the student takes whatever he wishes to riffle through to create his best response to get the highest marks.
The crux is:- assessing how well a student has mastered a topic becomes increasingly difficult as the final years and tiers of graduate school are encountered. Often the student is smarter in intellect than the examiner, but has a lower level of achievement - at that time.
Often lower grades can be assessed a lot faster via multiple choice questions that can be marked with an aperture card very quickly
There are many facets to teaching, the explanation of an aspect, to query students to assess how they understand that aspect. This can be spot tests where one aspect is asked what is it etc, often in a short interval in the last few minutes prior to end of that period. They can also be weekly/monthly/end of semester. These will vary, with end of a semester being a 1-2 hour detailed question set to which the student answers question by question, the weekly/monthly = lesser length/detail.
At each stage the student is asked to show how he has learned each of the listed test questions and the teacher later assesses the answers and gives the student points on each question so that at the end a summation will give an indication of the degree of mastery - students are often then instructed on the deficient areas.
Obviously the students can hire an expert to take their exam, as a group hire, or each student hiring his own expert to sit the exam for them. LOL - this and other schemes have been tried and they are part of the education burden. At University of Toronto exams are closely watched, with photo ID needed for just this reason. Dozens of 'ringers', taking exams for students, have been discovered. It is often hard to correctly ID students from various ethnic back grounds when the invigilator is from a different ethic/racial back ground who is not famiiar with the students back ground. The students search for the best possible 'ringer' to minimize the risk of discovery.
In summation - all aspect of teaching involve assessing the student as well as the teacher. Anything that reduces how well a student studies or engages in diversions - such as games played in class, or passes data between students to allow a correct answer to be given to a teacher that is not from the student's own knowledge base is a form of fraud. The student bears the cost of the fraud when he fails his exams = the money/time spent are wasted. He may get his degree, and then his patients suffer, if he is a doctor/dentist, or a house fire if he is a bad electrician granted his ticket by fraud.
AI is in a good position to teach topics, as well as to test how well topics have been mastered and to also pose detailed exams for students on a case by case basis, with a detailed back ground knowledge of that student's past work so he/she can be examined in exhaustive detail - detail normal examiners could not do due to time constraints. This area is in rapid expansion as we speak because costs and time restraints in teaching are causing large deficiencies in student bodies, to such a degree that student scores are falling steadily, ad the field is ripe for a revolution.
My oldest is at a pubic STEM school that requires an aptitude test for admission, so maybe a self-selecting bunch, but teachers give kids in-class and at-home assignments that require phones or laptops. Assignments are mostly turned in via Google Classroom. A lot will assign youtube videos to watch. One has his own channel with a substantial number of subscribers. They let kids use a graphing calculator app instead of spending $100 on a ti-82. Kids being distracted on their phones probably would have been doodling or passing notes 30 years ago. I think just leaning in at this point is the only plausible option.
Is it time to start designing schools so that the buildings are basically faraday cages that block all cell signals? And definitely no Wi-Fi.
Yea I know parents might cry “I need to be in contact with my child at ALL times”. But no you don’t and in the public education system you shouldn’t even have a choice, if you need something call the school someone will pick up on a landline and deliver your message. And if there’s a school shooting oh well if your kid dies they die so hug them tightly every morning like it’s the last.
Otherwise I just don’t see any way out of this problem.
No child left behind was the most disastrous cancer to infect public education. We should absolutely segregate the kids who don't want to learn from those who do, instead of dumbing them all down.
This has nothing to do with this problem though - phones are pervasive among kids today, absent policy allowing teachers to take them away, there isn't anything you can do.
While true, it's a related dysfunction that damaged American education in profound ways.
I went through an under-resourced education system with 50+ students per class and bused 3 hours per day to a school with gangs and drug problems because of my race. All the while, I was bored to tears with material already covered up to 2 years previously in private school. (Dad was a cheapskate and wanted more money for buying stereo equipment, and so Challenger had to go.)
Rutherford says he was careful not to blame his students for their phone dependency.
I remember a teacher in high school throwing a textbook at a student that wasn't paying attention. He paid attention after that. I suppose times and approaches to teaching have changed.
Absent physical violence, I spent 180 days in lunch detention during middle school for refusing to do my math homework due to the marginal impact it had on my grade. Even after 2 trimesters away from my friends during lunch I refused to do the teacher's busywork, and they refused to give me my time back. It was a zero-sum solution for both of us (and a surprisingly childish response from an adult that ought to know better).
Sometimes, students recognize the barriers around them and exploit them to their fullest potential. One student pays attention after getting the book thrown at them, another observes how the teacher aimed for the floor and tests their patience because they know they won't get hit no matter how many times they zone-out. It's disappointingly easy to bait educators into disproportionate escalation, in my problem-child experience.
I expected them fail me on the homework, as was fair. The assignment has a point-value, I showed up each morning with an empty notebook and requested a zero on the assignment instead of a late penalty. Homework was worth 15% of the final grade and I had no problem passing without any homework credit whatsoever.
The lesson I learned is that if you beat certain people at their own game they will never let you live it down. Whether I was dysfunctional or not, their response didn't work and they refused to renege after months of failure. They failed as a teacher, when I hadn't failed as a student.
Do you think your teacher saw potential in you and was trying to get more from you?
My biggest frustration with the public school near me is that they don’t care whether a student thrives, only that they don’t fail.
Attempting to instill a work ethic as a teacher is admirable, but clearly didn’t work in your case. I could see how facing resistant students could grind the optimism and energy out of a teacher.
I share a similar experience and response to talldyo. The problem is "we" (talldyo and I) understood how to solve the problems (as proved by passing the tests) but were uninterested in wasting our time doing busy work. The teacher could have changed their grading to be something like 50% of the grade comes from homework and 50% from tests. Then I likely would have done the homework, while still being pissed because it's just "busy work". I prefer just taking quizzes and tests to determine grades and if I understand the material. How I learn and how much practice I need to get to understanding and being able to solve the problem should be no ones business but my own. If the teacher was prudent they would have just left talldyo alone. The teacher needlessly caused additional problems and pain and suffering.
Did you achieve mastery of the subject matter without doing the homework? If so, kudos to you. If not, then perhaps doing the homework might have been of some value. Practicing leads to solving problems faster and with less mistakes.
Of course the length of the assignment matters, too. Hours of additional work would be a burden. So, I guess it depends on the situation. You would hope that the adults involved (parents and teachers) have the student’s best interest in mind and would work something out.
I was the kid who no one thought was paying attention, until I read back the last 3-5 min of conversation to the Teacher.
I dont think you can enhance learning thru fear, there is no way that you get people to be more engaged and retain information presented in that environment.
Well, here in Australia schools seem to successfully ban phones during school hours.
Perhaps "Kids who don't want to learn" is not a constructive way to look at the issue. Maybe "Kids who are engaged with something other than what is going on in the classroom" would be more useful. That goes for covert books, magazines, hunger, lack of sleep, drug addiction, unstable home life, personal drama, or any other distracting factor. Teachers and schools have existing strategies for these ranging from internal and external referrals, social support and psychologists, learning disability specialists, temporary removal from the class, etc. Some students will fail, but you should never brand kids as write-offs or uninterested, that's akin to giving up on them which becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
As for separating higher motivation and engagement students from the general student body, gifted and talented programs continue to exist for this purpose. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gifted_education
I attended such a program in Sydney Australia at ages 11 and 12 then a similarly academically tested high school. In the former and most of the latter case I found it to be quite positive experience, but lack any point of direct comparison. There were still troubled kids, drugs, etc. Mostly it was still slow and not very challenging. However, there were virtually no distracting elements in an average classroom whereas my understanding is that in many countries, high school teachers may often be unable to maintain a genuinely focused and academically engaged classroom. To me, this sounds like a state-mandated waste of time for all involved.
These days, where switched on kids can grok arbitrary subjects through the internet within seconds, what's the point of rote schooling? Perhaps we need to reduce the classroom hours expected of children and increase other activities, this would partially recognise the declining utility of rote knowledge in the workplace. This touches on the greater social problem, which is that post industrial revolution schooling largely performs a child minding function. What do we do with the kids if they're not locked in school? State and other schooling often also seeks to ingrain what IMHO are various negative, outmoded and incorrect ideas (much of religion, false assertions of the representative nature of a local "democratic" system, nationalism, etc.) in the student body. Home schooling is a good antidote but comes with its own challenges.
There are significant numbers of kids who have been trained not to want to learn in America because America is deeply anti-intellectual and teaching to excessive standardized testing drives what little curiosity there was out of greater numbers of them. As a result of this and wildly inappropriate teacher performance measurement, the really good teachers who inspire kids get frustrated and leave. As a result, most American public schools are watered-down, don't care about excellence, and are de facto prison daycare with absurd levels of performative testing pantomiming a quality education while being anything but. It's not the teachers' fault but the parents, voters, school districts, state education boards, and past US presidents who all share in culpability.
Don't take anything out on anyone. The modern problem is often the systematic destruction of gifted and talent programs, advanced placement, discarding of merit-based entrance, and of excellence that attacks gifted students in every way imaginable.
Too late. But that wasn't the first assault: the abandonment of phonics, forced busing, property tax cuts, creationism, culture wars, and arbitrary, unproven experiments are also doing all they can to dismantle what was once a shining accomplishment of commonwealth and excellence. Also, America has always been deeply anti-intellectual, but W said "hold my beer" and went about destroying it with good intentions without a shred of understanding. Hell is paved...
While I can identify with the plight, and want to keep my kid as phone-addiction free as possible.. I spent a lot of time using my TI-86 in high school. I got really good at Tetris, learned a bunch of TI-BASIC, and some z80. It was only ever something I did when I was bored/knew I wasn’t missing anything, but I guess I’d be saying the same about using my phone if I was a high schooler today.
Actually, for smart kids, I have an answer: give the desktop, FLOSS, teach them how to use their own environment. They'll find mobile incredibly crappy, limited and limiting they do not develop much interest for it.
Oh, yes, this assume there is money, space, knowledge etc to give a real desktop per child.
Judging by my previous addiction, I would say youtube desktop and youtube mobile experience is on par, also I believe TikTok is more comfortable on mobile(I never used it though). Same applies for the rest of social media. When you are sitting in a class and splitting your attention between what is being taught and your distraction, that distraction is unlikely to be some serious activity, because serious activities demand full attention
So you have a choice:
- make-yourself-a-desktop which is time-consuming, has dubious reward(what linux can do that Windows/MacOS can't?[1]) and is not comfortable to use everywhere
- phone that gives you all the means to distract yourself, is always in your pocket and requires no effort
If you don't explicitly aim to avoid the latter path I don't see any reason to choose your method
[1]: Having said that, I would never put windows on a personal computer. Answering my own question, there are certainly needs where Linux fits better, but for general desktop not so much
In a simple way: when you start using a device, not a drug, you not start to get high, you just want using it. If you discover, BEFORE YT and co, how to use a desktop and you are smart you can start doing smart thing with it and loving doing them.
Like putting a smart child in a library and let him/her read. Oh even if the child get YT on desktop, a properly configured one, with uBlock and so on, no, the experience is not on par with the mobile, it's far better, and the fact you do not live on a chair avoid the mechanism of having a device always with you: the mobile experience, even with DNS-based ads filtering is so horrific no one want if IF he/she already know the desktop one, and that's they key: you might eventually get addicted to desktop, but you have a life and a desktop, with a proper monitor, mechanical keyboard, a trackball etc does not came with you in your pocket. You can pass hours on it, but not as much as on a phone and you can't be bound to it while you live your life like those who chat on a phone at a restaurant.
People grew up literally expecting a nuclear war, or inside tyrannical expansionist states, and still had hope for the future.
We were worried about acid rain, and losing the ozone layer, and a ton of other stuff that we managed to solve. I doubt the kids today are fundamentally different than they were in the past.
Nuclear war, tyrannical expansionist states, are still on the menu for the current generations and things like acid rain and ozone layer depletion (along with a host of other pollution issues) could easily be again if the current efforts to undermine the EPA and its rules are successful.
The biggest difference between then and now I think is that kids then could see and believe a future world that is better then the one their parents had. Whereas today's kids can't see that, and rightfully so I would say.
Your comment contains at least two themes from the Black Planet song by The Sisters of Mercy: radiation and acid rain. Released in 1985, six years before the fall of the USSR, one year before Chernobyl. It recalles some of the fears of the past 40 years quite well. Now after another 40 years they're resurfacing again.
Candidly, you’re projecting your own feelings. You could go on. Kids could not. They don’t know or care, for the most part, about any “rights” that are or have been considered being “rolled back”
> “I would walk up to kids and say, ‘Give me your phone,’ and they would clutch it, and I would say that’s what an alcoholic would do if you tried to take away their bottle,” he says.
I agree there is a problem; but, how wildly condescending that is to say to someone.
I don’t consider this “condescending”, necessarily. The problem of smartphone addiction really is as bad as alcoholism. Students are absolutely doomed without extreme action to prevent or punish their use within schools.
Though I’d also say they’re doomed without better teacher compensation. Probably both.
“I would walk up to people and say ‘give me your money’ and they would clutch it, and I would say that’s what an alcoholic would do if you tried to take away their bottle.”
Does that sound stupid? Because it is. Their phone has the distinct quality of being theirs. Demanding someone turn over their possessions to you is not going to be met with acquiescence.
It's still theirs on the teacher's desk, and the kids knows they will get it back 40 minutes later.
This is pure defiance of authority, they know that have no business playing with their phones during class but they also know they can get away with it.
Whether this attitude is caused by true addiction or general disrespect for teachers is left a an exercise to the reader. A combination most likely.
The problem is parents and schools must support teachers in screen bans by checking devices into "phone lockers" or a "phone concierge".
A classroom isn't conducive to maintaining order and focus with the presence of addictive distractions.