And the other daughter's middle school is still the same as before the ban. They previously had a ban stricter than the provincial government's mandate so nothing changed.
If the main purpose is just texting with their parents in case of emergency, they could get an old-fashioned pager for that. I heard that these devices are a pretty severe explosion hazard though.
Like, what difference does it make anyway if the kid can or cannot text the parent? Not like the parent can alter the situation in any way.
Yea this is what I don’t get. How is a cell phone actually going to help when there’s a school shooter? I guess you can throw the phone at his head. There’s pretty much no reason a kid needs a phone in school. If the parent needs to get in touch with him they can call the office like in the 70s, 80s, 90s, and 2000s.
I am 10000% anti-phones in schools but this is silly argument to make. every parent of a child in America worries every day something may happen and when it does time it takes to reach your kid will be the longest time no parent should have to live through
this situation is also rehearsed - phone on silent, text only, safe words … hope you never need to be prepared for it
I.e. it sounds like you've terrified your children.
Why would you do that?
We scare children because we're scared, and somehow imagine that sharing that fear with them is helpful to anything but our own selfish fear of fear.
But I suggest that active shooter drills do more harm than good.
And I suggest that it's a mistake for parents to legitimize active shooter drills by giving their kids special silent-phone-text-me-safe-words instructions.
like the stories of companies at world trade center who took time to practice the extremely unlikely event of “airplane hit the building how do we get out” and then safely got out cause they knew what they needed to do, kids also need to be prepared as well. it is horrible thing kids have to go through in the US but pretending this is not happening I believe is not the way to approach it
The correct method of training humans to conduct themselves in an orderly fashion under dramatic circumstances does not involve frightening them.
Prepare for all sorts of emergency scenarios. Tornadoes, earthquakes, power outages, fires, police activity, bomb threats. Prepare for them appropriately. In some cases: assemble at a distance outside. In some cases: go to safe assigned locations. In some cases: shelter in place. Category X scenario: take action Y.
Don't tell kids that superbad monsters are coming to get you and it's your responsibility to hide and not die (but make sure to text mommy and daddy! phone on silent!!1!!1! safeword "cacao"!!) when these evil creatures with big magic weapons come to hunt you down and watch you twist and scream in pain and eat your liver and we're soo worried about you and just want you to be safe so please don't die gruesomely, we love you so sorry we can't protect you make sure to study hard and do your homework.
The foregoing is an only slightly editorialized version of the way some schools and some parents communicate ASD importance to their children. I've seen worse. It involved parents sobbing. I've seen better too, but not much better.
IMO the objection is dumb regardless, but maybe that will help translate.
Both happen several times per week, neither happen several times per week at schools.
[0]: https://www.cnn.com/us/school-shootings-fast-facts-dg/index....
Back in my day, all electronics had to stay in your locker except your calculator, including pagers, personal organizers and for the very few kids who were wealthy enough to have one, phones as well. This would be about the time that Motorola and Nokia were selling giant bricks that they called phones.
Edit: and no, school shootings had nothing to do with the change. We'd gone through Columbine not long before, and despite the media spamming everyone they're very rare even today.
I was a high school senior in 2003-2004, and my dad gave me a phone to use that year, and I think most of my classmates had one too, but I don't actually remember there being any problem or policy about it. I assume that's because phones were just phones at the time, and who were you going to call during class? I don't think I even sent or received a text message until a couple years later.
By 2011, when my wife started teaching in a public high school, it was the wild west with phones. The school policy gave her the authority to take them away during class, but then she was responsible for documenting and safekeeping them, so she didn't bother despite the constant distraction as kids openly looked at them during class.
The capabilities and market penetration grew so fast that I think most schools were just caught off guard, trying in vein to implement rules after the phones were already in every kid's hand.
I'm not defending the use of cell phones in class. But there have to be more effective ways to reduce their use among students rather than simply banning them.
Arguably those have all been tried, and don't work.
I think it's not hard to imagine why algebra may be less captivating than a constant short-form-video dopamine stream for an adolecent.
that’s about 1,200 more than parents worry about anything else
Some examples that have been on these lists in the past:
- A school resource officers firearm that accidentally went off when a child hugged around his waist. No injuries (there are other questions, but doesn't qualify in the same way)
- An empty .22 casing found in a random school parking lot, probably fell out of a car or got caught in a boot or similar.
- A gang fight at 1am on a Saturday near to school property.
- My personal favorite: The two schools closest to me that showed up on one of the lists (Everytown, I believe?) because the police were dealing with an active robbery situation about 1/2 mi away and they asked the schools to go into lockdown. Apparently "lockdown" immediately and only ever means schools shooting.
- 2/3rd of school shootings that NPR couldn't verify happened.[1] [1] https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2018/08/27/640323347/the-sch...
While I get your point, I think when you have to be concerned about how 'school shooting' is defined your country has a big problem.
The mass violence shootings that you hear about on TV where anyone and everyone might be a victim are the exception, not the norm.
Yes, I want to know these things happen.
No, they are not such an emergency that my kid needs to be taking time from class to text me about it.
Most schools in areas with lots of crime or gang activity have metal detectors and other security at the doors. Violence is happening off hours, or between gang members either off campus (but close enough to warrant bringing people inside) or at the edges.
In a country with hundreds of millions of people, a thousand over four years is not exactly a rounding error given that it is concentrated in a few areas, but still close enough that the vast majority will never experience it in their lives.
Like, a locked down school approved phone that cant load social apps makes sense (And yeah I am more than happy if the tooling is swiss cheese, because we need to inspire new pentesters somehow). But removing them entirely? That seems bonkers.
The evidence that's used for these bans is more "everyone knows this is true" and less "we have proven that this causes way too much farm, therefore we're banning it". Everyone knows sitting too close to the TV ruins your eyesight, right?
Of course smartphones shouldn't be in use during class, but that seems to hardly ever be in question. It's always "total phone ban" advocated by people who will never be impacted by it based on some bogus study like in the original article.
The US even bans alcohol for young adults, and there are few places where someone under 16 can buy it.
Social media is designed to be addictive, and it seems reasonable to ban addictive things for kids by default. IMO we would be better off if adults stopped using it too.
But we don't ban harmless tools that kids will need to learn to use in adult life.
And you can tell me all about the harms of social media, but social media can be accessed via computer also. Then you will tell me all about how computers are locked down to prevent access to social media at school. Effectively you will go on to describe reasonable controls that schools have decided they simply wont implement in this case.
The truth of the matter is technical literacy is in decline, schools have almost completely vacated the space. If teachers are mad at distracted students they can incorporate the distraction into the education (My secondary school did this with classes Excel in for basic financial maths, edutainment games, dedicated computer research lessons for otherwise book subjects) or choose to entirely stunt the kids by removing them.
Schools did this same shit to computers, they started by banning them, then incorporating them in lots of meaningful ways. If schools tried to ban laptops at school today we would be up in arms, but lots of "reasonable" people saw it as an easy quick win the last time around.
The trick here is to convince schools not to be 10 years behind but to keep up. If that means more funding in you jurisdiction, or higher fees, then do it.
I always remember a good friend of mine who was the first in his entire school to write an essay on his Apple II and print it off to hand in to the teacher. He got a zero for "cheating" and swore off computers until he was over 30. I imagine his experience would be familiar to kids caught "cheating" by using their pocket access to all of human knowledge to conduct research.
Like certain types of food? Watching TV? Playing video games? Reading (fiction) books? Getting into relationships/making friends? Pretty much everything great in life can become an addiction.
If the claim is that social media is designed to be addictive, therefore we should ban it, then I would love someone being able to demonstrate that and that in this instance it's worse than usual. I want to see what "rules" they use to design something to be addictive, but I don't think this demonstration is ever going to happen, because social media isn't designed to be addictive - nobody knows how to do that. It's iteratively designed. They try stuff and make more of what works.
My friends in the US seems shocked at the fact that kids couldn't have a phone during class hours. When I asked why their main issue was that if kids cell phones were in their lockers, how would they text their parents to say they were ok when their school had a shooting.
Which just goes to show how much your environment affects your thinking. I've never once thought or even considered there could be a school shooting at a school here.