yeah, too many school authorities do act taht way. For a approach going more in the opposite direction, see, for example: piped.video/watch?v=dk60sYrU2RU (maybe skip to aa minute in. presented, the idea, in that case, by sugata mitra. The Talk is not new, but still relevant I’d think, and relates to the post here. ) 💻🖥️
For anotger, similar, but also different example, see piped.video/watch?v=WNuv0_MLrKg this one specifically mentions phones early on, too.
So if you believe in, or are open to the idea, that the approach in in the main meme post isn’t the best, then the stories in the piped videos might be of some intrest to you.
tdlr: 🎶you can use your phone if yiu want to, yiu can leave your technophobe schoolmaster behind,… 🎶🎧
In classrooms children shouldn’t remove their phones from their pockets at all, they are there to focus on the class. If we removed our phones from our pockets, they would be confiscated until the end of class, and rightly so.
School is for paying attention and learning, not for going into your own little world on your phone (which we’re all guilty of).
Also, the only time you need to use a computer at school is during IT lessons, or study/research sessions. School is the time that we learn and perfect our handwriting abilities, and our abilities to read through books, make notes based on what the teacher is saying, or writing on the blackboard, etc. It is not appropriate to pull out a laptop and use that instead, because that won’t teach the child these important hand skills.
I’m talking about primary school and secondary school, and mostly college too. Once the student is 18 and begins university, there’s nothing stopping them from using computers or phones, it’s up to them to regulate their own attention and such.
Why do you need to learn handwriting skills? I personally write everything to notes on my phone or laptop in real life and the only place where I need to hand-write long pieces of text is in school. Writing on a blackboard skills must be a joke. School should teach you to make notes based on what the teacher is saying (the skill here is being able to find the useful information and being able to store it), but the method of writing it should be the method you are gonna use irl. For me and most people in my age I believe, it’s writing it on phone or a laptop. Tbf phones in school bring various problems, but I don’t think lack of writing skills is among them.
Well, at University, we learned that students retain more of what they’re learning, when writing. Our brains are not fully adapted yet to process typed input as well as written.
School will never be as interesting as a phone. Your teacher will never be as entertaining as an influencer. Your textbooks will never be as entertaining as your feed. What families and teenagers have to understand is that education is a choice. If you want to learn, you’ll probably have to put your phone down for long periods of time to actively listen and learn. It’s difficult. It tires you out. It’ll frustrate you. But you will eventually learn.
Then again - when I look at home prices and inflation, I understand young people’s feelings of futility.
Good luck young people. I’m really rooting for you to figure this out.
As a former young person that came from poverty and is finally buying a house in a high cost of living area, go read “so good they can’t ignore you” it might help with the figuring out!
I don’t think it’s just a feeling of futility - it’s true phones can be distracting and offer more potential entertainment, and it’s true learning can sometimes be a slog. At the same time, learning can be fun and engaging, and phones can offer access to a wealth of information (of highly varying quality, admittedly).
Concentrating too hard on mere academic success as gauged by metrics like school grades is undoubtedly discouraging for a student who only goes to school if they are told they must.
Tiktok cannot do it better. Tiktok is an app designed to hold attention. If you are more engaged by cat videos than geometry tiktok will not try and show you geometry
that would just be a new app and why would tiktok cooperate with that. There isn’t as much money in that area and even if there was an educational app kids would go on tiktok instead of it
people learn things all the time despite phones existing. the issue is not solely being more entertaining. people need to find their learning meaningful and aligned with their own interests and goals. students don’t, and so they go on their phones. go to a college classroom and you’ll see people more engaged on average. still far from perfect, and that system is broken in many ways too, but people are at least studying something they chose and are presumably interested in.
“I’m really rooting for you to figure this out” rings hollow. we all need to be part of the solution. gen Z feels like it’s carrying the expectation of fixing literally every societal problem right now and it sucks.
The amount of times I told my students they can use their phone for certain exercises, then 90% of them just went on Tiktok or played Clash Of Clans, is why is started not allowing phones.
I get that to the 10% it was super helpful but it’s just easier to not allow everyone.
I’m all for giving them a chance to prove they’re able to be responsible. Especially the kids that always try hard and deserve to be trusted.
I found that a lot of kids struggled to accept any consequences of their actions, though taking their phones off them for playing games was pretty clear to them.
It would be funny if people were forced to do something akin to mandatory military service but for working at a school as a paraprofessional or other aide for a little while. I feel like most people really have no idea how much teachers have to juggle and deal with on a daily basis. Come see how my kids behave when left to their own devices and then judge me.
For sure! A lot of parents don’t really understand the amount of stuff teachers have to go through either, and we don’t get paid for the hundreds of hours we do outside of teaching hours.
It’s why I had to quit in the end. Felt like I couldn’t give it my all because I was mentally and physically exhausted.
Block cellular with thick walls, then only allow them through wifi. Things like youtube can only be acces with a cabled connection. Something like this seems like a good start.
Even before phones schools were like this. But they’d just put you in mandatory extra classes to fix your grades. Instead of, you know, talking to you. To get to know how you are doing and how you’re feeling.
I’ve hated my school time and all it taught me is teachers are obsessed with having power over others. Maybe not all teachers, but a lot are like this. They won’t listen to you, they just force their opinion on you. And if you don’t do well in their pre-made lecturing framework then it’s on you because you don’t pay attention and you are lazy. It’s never on them.
I don’t think it’s particularly unreasonable to conclude that any decent approach to the first will also include the second. That shit is literally designed to be addictive, even the best teachers are gonna struggle to compete.
They just threw pencils and erasers at me if they needed me to listen. Most of what they were talking about was covered in the book so they just let me read it. The only exception was math.
Imagine getting dissaproval votes (or whatever we’re calling not downvotes) just for sharing a completely neutral retelling of something that happened to you lmao
Wait you mean like you have time at school where you’re not being actively taught? At my school and in the uk in general (i think) that was never a thing for us, studying was something we were meant to do in our own time
Slovakia here. The school is kinda crap. 2 times each week the whole day is subject called “Professional training”, but we almost never do anything at all in there. Whole 2 days of nothing, I am being serious. It’s basically just for attendance, and even that just partially. If you arrive 4 hours late, the teacher will sign you off as if you were there the whole day.
I hope it changes this year. I hope.
Also, math teacher allows us to listen to music during exams. That was her idea, actually.
But we have also integrated the phones into the process. Teachers send us notes we’re meant to work with during classes, on our phones. Likewise we do exams on our phones. Adapt and overcome. This is already high school though. Only the first hear of high school is mandatory, now I am here because I want to study, not because I have to. I could leave anytime if I wished to do that.
Nearly half of my time in public school (depending on the class) was time spent independently working on things. Time that the only thing between me and completing a task was disregarding the various noises my classmates were making.
Did you read the “during study time” part of the comment. I certainly don’t think student’s shpuld be listening to music when a teacher is actively teaching.
This has been an awakening to Lemmy’s philosophical and literate ideals.
Just do what I did in school and put an earphone down your sleeve. Rest head on hand. Listen to music. It’s not difficult, I got away with it in exams ffs (I dont recommend that last bit btw, that was young stupidity in hindsight)
During class. You made up “study time”. No one cares if your on your phone studying during “study time” in the library. But if someone is lecturing you shouldn’t be on your phone or have earbuds in.
Oh no, everyone else was, in fact, learning while you and the other whiners were either sleeping or smoking weed in the bathroom thinking they’re above it all and that doing what everyone else was doing was beneath them.
Yes. I always have and always will because I always loved learning for its own sake.
Learning is what gets you through hard times when you don’t know where your next meal is coming from.
Learning helps you get your next meal.
There is no hierarchy of needs. Your needs shift and change over time, and overlap most of the time.
Source: 40 years of life experience, survived abuse as a child and as an adult, escaped poverty and homelessness, and am now on track to return to college and own my own businesses, none of which would be possible without my education and desire to learn
Oh yeah I totally needed to learn about what a writer might have thought 200 years ago while writing EVERY SINGLE PAGE of his book, when I already knew that I wanted to do something with technology.
But we didnt have enough teachers for biology and physics and chemistry, so instead we got more literature.
I wonder where I (and our whole society) would be now if schools werent meant for preparing kids to transition into work, but instead about getting the full potential out of every kid.
Im German and I did learn English in school, but not really, because it was taught in a way that made me lose interest immediately.
I actually learned English when I started to watch Minecraft Youtubers in English because they had some interesting contraptions in their videos or something like that (Its been a while, I dont know exactly why I started watching them)
Not taking enough literature and humanities is how we end up with Elon. Every little wannabe engineer who thinks they shouldn’t have to take a humanities course should be smacked in the face by a physics demonstration.
If you think studying literature is to teach you literature, you’re sorely mistaken. Similar to if you think you study mathematics to learn mathematics.
You are taught literature so you can better communicate with other people. What is the author’s intention with this passage? What are they trying to say? What might their motivations be? Now apply this to a letter from a potential business partner or a politician’s tweet and you might begin to see how what you were taught becomes relevant.
Why are you taught grammar? Who cares whether you use the Oxford comma or not? Who has the need to know what mood, theme, and figurative language are? Apply this in the context of trying to write a professional email to your boss or trying to tell a story to engage other people, and maybe you’ll start to see that it wasn’t worthless.
Why do we need to know the way to prove that the angles of a triangle add up to 180? Who needs to know the Quadratic formula and how to apply it? It’s so you know how to think rationally and apply logic rigourously, so you don’t fall into familiar logical traps that we see on the evening news and the Internet every day.
Why do you need to know how cells reproduce? Why do we need to know how the pH scale works? It’s so when people on Facebook claim that vaccines erase your DNA or that alkaline water prevents cancer, you’ll know better.
Technology is clinically known to suppress emotions. It has a correlation to a-motivation. So banning technology use in school is actually good. It’s just that most schools think that will fix all the motivation problems, which it will not.
Does it though? That kind of sounds like buzzword science to me. Especially since I can’t find anything that actually says that it is technology being at fault here.
Yes, it absolutely does. We have a finite limit of attention / emotional energy / etc and most of the stuff on your phone is tailor made to try and monopolize it.
Watch The Social Dilemma on netflix, it will give a better and more compelling argument than an online article explaining it, however, I worked at facebook and I’ve seen the internal market research around boosting “engagement”. They’re all playing a zero sum game and know that they’re trying to maximize your engagement at the expense of everything else that might possibly be engaging (including other apps, games, media content, and incidentally useful stuff like work and school).
A recent survey of adolescents without symptoms of ADHD at the start of the study indicated a significant association between more frequent use of digital media and symptoms of ADHD after 24 months of follow-up.Citation [ jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/…/2687861 ]
Executive Functioning: Executive function refers to a set of high-order cognitive abilities that enable humans to plan, focus attention, remember instructions, and juggle multiple tasks successfully. The reason for the link between technology use and attention problems is uncertain, but might be attributed to repetitive attentional shifts and multitasking, which can impair executive functioning. [pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26999354/]
In a study of children aged 8 to 12 years, more screen and less reading time were associated with decreased brain connectivity between regions controlling word recognition and both language and cognitive con[ pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29215151/ ] Such connections are considered important for reading comprehension and suggest a negative impact of screen time on the developing brain. Structurally, increased screen time relates to decreased integrity of white-matter pathways necessary for reading and language. [ pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31682712/ ]
“Correlations between symptoms of addictive technology use and mental disorder symptoms were all positive and significant, including the weak interrelationship between the two addictive technological behaviors.”
“Although no studies showing causal relationships yet exist, problematic Internet use is associated with having greater difficulties in emotion regulation…” [ europepmc.org/article/med/25041745 ]
there are too many and I don’t have more time atm.
A recent survey of adolescents without symptoms of ADHD at the start of the study indicated a significant association between more frequent use of digital media and symptoms of ADHD after 24 months of follow-up.Citation [ jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/…/2687861 ]
Executive Functioning: Executive function refers to a set of high-order cognitive abilities that enable humans to plan, focus attention, remember instructions, and juggle multiple tasks successfully. The reason for the link between technology use and attention problems is uncertain, but might be attributed to repetitive attentional shifts and multitasking, which can impair executive functioning. [pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26999354/]
In a study of children aged 8 to 12 years, more screen and less reading time were associated with decreased brain connectivity between regions controlling word recognition and both language and cognitive con[ pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29215151/ ] Such connections are considered important for reading comprehension and suggest a negative impact of screen time on the developing brain. Structurally, increased screen time relates to decreased integrity of white-matter pathways necessary for reading and language. [ pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31682712/ ]
“Correlations between symptoms of addictive technology use and mental disorder symptoms were all positive and significant, including the weak interrelationship between the two addictive technological behaviors.”
“Although no studies showing causal relationships yet exist, problematic Internet use is associated with having greater difficulties in emotion regulation…” [ europepmc.org/article/med/25041745 ]
there are too many and I don’t have more time atm.
That means teachers would have to discipline, which means that the superintendent or school board would have to pay a fair salary and give fair tools, which means the state or city would have to up the budget, which means that we wouldn’t be able to repave the roads in the nice part of town next spring.
having to look at what the kid is doing and judge things on a case by case basis would eat into lesson time which is already stretched thin with class management as it is
How do you address low motivation levels though? The response to covid, the endless school shootings, their parent’s jobs, and even a small amount of reading about climate apocalypse should make it obvious to children that society despises them and that they have no future. How do you motivate someone to do well in school under those conditions if they’re not already motivated?
education is a benefit in and of itself. Maths helps develop your brain to solve problems, english makes you more able to appreciate culture which in turn will make you more interesting and better able to socialise, history helps you understand how the world is and that it used to and can be different.
These things are worth learning even if you don’t do them for work
I think addressing low motivation levels is beyond the scope of the school’s ability to affect things. When I was in high school I remember not caring about much of anything because I was convinced that even though I was almost certainly going to college, I would still just end up in a ‘passionless bullshit make-work dead end job’ like my parents, working long hours just to eke out a meager living, enough to keep getting back in the goddamn hamster wheel, and that really sapped my will to do anything productive. I ended up being completely right but I’m lucky enough to be living in this era of realization that work in the states is inherently bullshit, and that I make enough money to pursue passions outside of my 8-6.
I agree that the school environment should be more motivating, but there’s no way to compete with apps and games designed to be addictive, even adults have trouble avoiding their phones at work.
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