Agreed. It's more practical to tell seniors that all gift card requests are scams rather than teaching them to identify warning signs, since legitimate gift card payments are so rare.
I'm not particularly old yet, in my mid-thirties, but I reacted like someone much older when I learned kids are allowed to carry around their phones all day at school.
Back in my day (when we walked to school uphill both ways), we weren't allowed to carry around basic flip phones. They had to be in our locker and only used before or after school.
When and why did it become acceptable for much more distracting and stimulating devices to be allowed in class?
I was a classroom teacher from 1994-2019, so I watched the transition through the advent of phones until just before Covid. It's not as simple as it seems, for a few reasons.
One, there's the very real pressure from parents to be able to contact their kids when they need to. In the US, regular school shootings have made this a complicated issue to navigate.
Also, it requires much more consistency from school staff than most people realize. If it's top down and not supported by just about everyone, then many teachers and staff find themselves in endless battles. It takes more consistency and clarity of vision, and consistent enforcement than many schools are capable of.
Last, the devices students carry with them are often more capable and reliable than school based technology. So when students need to look something up, it's easy for them to just pull out their device.
Super-addictive devices in a society that's prioritizing many of the wrong things is a hard thing to manage. How many of you would give up your tech salaries to make $40-60k to take on these issues?
There have been 70 school shootings (not mass shootings) this year, including accidental discharges. Required caveat that any school gun deaths are too much, etc. etc.
But... this means that a student is significantly more likely to get injured or killed riding in car with their friends, but somehow that was allowed before phones. The school shootings excuse is not a reason to let kids have phones in schools.
If they need to contact their kids they can call the school to talk to them in the very rare case that is actually necessary. It was quite nice and refreshing to have the umbilical cut to your parents while you were at school in the past. You had to learn how to be on your own.
If there is a school shooting, what is texting their kid going to do?
I feel too few people apply the same logic to themselves.
For instance would you put your phone in a locker for the time you're on the clock for work ? Some professions require that, it's not an unreasonable proposition in itself. But how many actually can/would do it ?
Some people see it as a guilt thing and just assume they're succumbing to some tentation. Another way to look at it is the generic message being just wrong, we're doing fine _enough_ as we do now, and pushing moral principals nobody actually cares about on kids isn't as smart as people want to make it.
I don't think those situations are comparable. Adults in the workplace are expected to get their work done, meet deadlines, act professionally, etc. If an employee doesn't do that, there are consequences, and we judge that adults can decide for themselves if they want to bear those consequences.
We put extra rules in place for kids because their brains aren't fully developed and they very often incorrectly assess whether or not the consequences of an action are worth it.
(And yes, adults are bad at that assessment sometimes, too, but we as a society have decided that at some point we need to take off the training wheels.)
I think people put way too much weight in the distinction between kids and adults. Sure pre-schoolers will be in a very limited place bilologically, but if we're talking 9~10yo and later, the core difference will be social experience and overall knowledge.
To put it in perspective, some people will still live their all life in an institution dictating their life rhythm, potentially setting how they dress and where they live, what they eat. That's how working in a factory line and getting a place in a company dormitory will be like. We basically modeled school according to that model, not by first looking at kids and thinking long and hard at their biological needs and how to best match their needs. School uniforms looking like adult cosplay version is in line with this as well.
> Adults in the workplace are expected to get their work done, meet deadlines, act professionally, etc.
We expect kids to get their work down, pass the scheduled tests, act according to the ~company~school rules.
I'd argue generic schools have always tried to just mold kids into what society wants as adults, and only a few places genuinely focus on sheer education. But even under the "mold the kids" premise, expecting kids to deal with smartphones, digital communication and SNS all at once at 18 is just a recipe for disaster. Understanding how to do what they're expected to, while having access and properly using all of those is probably the most basic life skill they absolutely need in this day and age.
> "In the US, regular school shootings have made this a complicated issue [...]"
That sentence really stood out to me. When (and where) I grew up this wasn't even a possibility one would consider. It reminds me how irrelevant my frame of reference is when trying to think about how to address difficulties facing schools, educators and pupils today.
This is bulk of the problem. Don't expect kids to do better when their role models screw up so badly. Sure some will come on top of their own parents but thats not the norm rather just an exception.
There is always the peer pressure excuse but thats not good enough. At the end who buys and setups and keeps paying for that phone?
The other side of it - why can't parents set up screen time and app limits, especially during school hours? No kid needs access to clash royale or snapchat during the school day. The phone should be locked down to "essentials" like the calculator, etc.
I think it is precisely because they are more distracting. When the most addictive thing in phones was the snake game, kids did not bother to insist in using their phones all the time. Now, when you try to tell a pupil to put the phone away, it often results in a huge arguments, so eventually teachers gave up.
no seizing of phones, no detention/disciplary action? It's not even about the phones at that point, it's just general disrespect to staff. What changed overtime?
Or maybe it was always this way and I simply had a better environment?
As usual, it's the parents, as a result of decades of creeping helicopter parenting. Without district-wide policy, if a teacher were to confiscate a phone, that would lead to a parent calling the school administrator to complain. The administrators, absent a policy, are spineless, and assure the parent it won't happen again. The teacher then gets chastised by the administration.
So then the teachers just stop caring: doing something about the phone distraction will only cause them grief. If the kids don't learn, whatever, not their problem, really, as long as the same thing is happening in every other classroom, which it is.
A school-wide policy, or, even better, a district-wide policy gives the teachers and school administrators cover: they can make sympathetic noises when the parents complain, but tell the parents there's nothing they can do, because the policy comes from above their pay grade.
We weren't allowed to have any of several different individual devices the functions of which are present in a smartphone. Banning that stuff was more-or-less uncontroversial. Obviously kids in an ordinary classroom shouldn't have instant cameras, and video recorders, and audio recorders, and Walkmen, and radios, and game boys, and TVs, and flashlights, and...
Now we have devices that are all of those things in one and parents will fight you if you try to keep kids from having or using them. Go figure.
What's baffling is why so many more people started thinking all those devices were OK when they're combined into one device. Like, not much of this is novel, we could have had devices that did most of the relevant things a smartphone does, in class. But we didn't because of fucking course they weren't permitted.
I really don't understand why the parents would fight for them. My theoretical kid is there to learn, enforce any reasonable rules that can disrupt that goal.
It's also in general a good way to form work habits for future aspects. Be it college, a job, military, etc. You can't fight over having your phone out to your boss. You can do it to your professor, but that's your $20k/yr tuition talking.
Parents really like the convenience and the feeling of safety they get when their kid has a phone. If they have to change school pickup plans they'd much rather text their kid than call and leave a message with the school office and then hope that the office gets the message to their kid.
We're so used to being able to get in touch with our family members at all times that it feels really unnerving when your kid isn't immediately accessible.
And the parents who complain think that their kids aren't the ones who are addicted to their phones.
That's why these bans needed to happen at the state or school district level - expecting individual teachers to have to spend their time arguing with parents and kids over cell phones was just not realistic.
This is kind of a weird example to begin with on a forum mostly populated by software engineers, because I'd find it very weird if a manager ever objected to someone using their personal phone at a SWE or similar office job, but I'd guess that the sets of jobs where a "boss" would object to someone using their phone during work (but still getting their work done) and those that would potentially have a company phone are mostly disjoint... a complete prohibition on using your phone seems like entry-level retail job type rules. excepting corner-case stuff like some very high security facility where you wouldn't even be allowed to bring any outside electronics in.
Software is a bit isolated from this (there's computers for "research" regardless, after all). But phone policies can be very strict in most other sectors of work. Seen as a dostraction at worst and unprofessional at best. A teacher wouldn't be able to just get away with having their phone out during class unless there's an emergency.
Some parents message their kids all through the day, they treat it as some kind of social media. Making kids focus on school instead of immediately replying to text messages upsets the parents.
Some (like, one or two per hundred students or so) may occasionally call their kid when they know they’re in class. Not because there’s a family emergency or something (and c’mon, you can still call the office for that) but just to shoot the shit. Talk about a WTF.
It became "acceptable" because the teachers and admin were already on their phones constantly. I went to grade school from 2005-2017, when iPhones came around the adults got them years before kids did, I had numerous teachers that would sit on their phones half the class.
Yeah I'm not that far out of high school but my school in the late 00's had a library policy on phones. You can keep them in your pocket, but don't bring them out during school. Otherwise they get taken for the class time, and it escalates from there.
This included recess and pretty much extended to all non-calculator electronic devices, but it was generally more lax when you weren't disrupting someone. I couldn't imagine brazenly having my phone out while a teacher was talking unless it was an emergency.
I'm a little older than you (mid forties), and back in my day (when we walked to school uphill, both ways, in the snow, with no shoes), they banned pagers. (And the penalties could be pretty bad, since "only drug dealers have pagers".)
(The thing that annoyed teachers was when we played games on our graphing calculators, which they of course couldn't ban, since the school required them in the first place!)
Block Dude! I also spent quite a bit of time writing functions and tools on my TI-84+, probably the closest thing I'll have to "growing up writing BASIC" since I missed that bus.
I'm a little older than you (mid fifties) and back in my day we couldn't have walkmans/headphones on inside the school. I walked so in the winter I would wear headphones instead of earmuffs/hats (had to rock that 80's hair) and got in trouble all the time. Like one step in the building and busted.
I think the biggest barrier to a phone ban being more widely adopted is parents. My wife works in the front office of a middle school and parents lose their minds if a kid gets their phone taken away. "But but but what if I NEED to get ahold of my kid during the day?". Umm... You ask the school to get your kid? I dunno seems pretty straightforward.
Then again I'm in an affluent area where moms against liberty (as I call them) are prevalent so maybe it's just the people here?
In my case phones were just starting to become commonplace, the Razr was the coolest phone to have, we had iPods but not iPhones, etc. Most instructors didn't want to see any phones and would threaten to take them away, so we became skilled at using T9 under the desk or in sweatshirt pockets, etc.
Never. There has never been a time when it was OK to use a phone in class. What happened is A) Some kids do take their phone out and play with them and either get caught or not B) Something happens and kids record it aka school fight videos. C) giant moral panic that has very little basis in reality.
> B) Something happens and kids record it aka school fight videos.
A friend's kid got in a small amount of trouble for something along these lines. He was "present at but not involved in" a fight at school, where some of the other kids were shooting it on their phones.
Then one of the teachers came round the corner to break it up and take the guilty parties off to the headmaster's office.
My mate's son, kind of similar thinker to his dad, clever guy, bit of a windup merchant, sprung into action.
"OKAY, CUT! Right, you and you - " pointing at the antagonists " - reset please, everyone else places right now please, " and rounds on the teacher "... and you can be here but you have to be out of my shot."
There's no way to prove they weren't trying to make a film. There was a note home from the school that basically said "We know he's at it, we just can't prove he's at it, but we do know that he's not going to do that again, right?"
In the 90's only drug dealers had pagers and cell phones, at least in the eyes of the board of education. If you were caught with one you'd be expelled.
Many people are tired of the toxic positivity common in corporate speak, which lets poor performers off the hook, and prevents high-quality talent from speaking freely.
"A complete lack of empathy" is a bit of a stretch, no? Calling someone a monkey is fairly lighthearted, while getting the point across that maybe they should take stock of the awareness of their abilities.
Here’s a “high performer” realising that it was his toxicity that was the problem, and he needs to fix it.
> This week people in our community confronted me about my lifetime of not understanding emotions. My flippant attacks in emails have been both unprofessional and uncalled for.
> Especially at times when I made it personal. In my quest for a better patch, this made sense to me. I know now this was not OK and I am truly sorry. The above is basically a long-winded way to get to the somewhat painful personal admission that hey, I need to change some of my behavior, and I want to apologize to the people that my personal behavior hurt and possibly drove away from kernel development entirely.
And he did. And the project he heads is better for it. You don’t need to call people names to run a project well. Linus learned that. It’s time that other people who failed to grow up learn it too.
There are honest constructive ways to engage that don't let poor performers off the hook.
Calling people monkeys and losers is just shitty. It doesn't achieve anything, it's divisive, and it's often counterproductive because it creates cultures of fear.
To whom it may concern, for those who use the modem in bridge mode, it is possible to discreetly pop open the Xfinity modem and disconnect the wireless antennas.
On mine, Apple TV+ (the official app as well as Safari) will refuse to play 4K through a similar adapter (VMM7100) on an OLED C2 42 from Cable Matters with the latest 120Hz supporting firmware. I assume it is because HDCP is broken. It works fine with the Mac Mini's built in HDMI. Frustratingly there is no great way to debug this, but if you open up Safari and look in the network tab, you can see the resolution of the video being streamed.
Does your adapter work at 120Hz without updating the firmware? If it does, does it support HDCP?
When I lived in Chicago with a car, and parked it in the small lot behind a condo building, I had to battle with the rats chewing through my car's wires. Twice they chewed through the MAP sensor wires which caused all kinds of misfires. Had to rewire that whole section of the harness. Then wrapped every wire I could see with this rat tape, and it worked for a while, until maybe the hot/cold cycle of the engine bay degraded the tape enough to not be effective.
They loved the warmth of the engine in winter. They'd climb up into the engine bay and hang out throughout it, bringing along nesting material, aka trash.
To try get rid of them, I tried the typical bait boxes, specialized rat traps, regular rat traps, peppermint, moth balls, a motion sensor light underneath the car, and more. The only thing that really worked was sending so many rat reports to the city that they had to keep coming out to bait the burrows in the neighbors small yard, until they likely talked to the owner directly to do something about it. I had talked with the guy briefly once and asked him about the rats (that were obviously only coming from his small backyard), and his response was pretty much "well it's the city so yeah they're around." Pretty sure one of his tenants also abruptly moved out because the rats chewed through their car too.
The lack of awareness from the guy contributed to me moving out of the city for good. Couldn't stand playing the lottery of good neighbors when most were either renters or inept owners, or a combination of both.
> The only thing that really worked was sending so many rat reports to the city that they had to keep coming out to bait the burrows in the neighbors small yard, until they likely talked to the owner directly to do something about it.
I was recently deputized into the "Rat Pack" of New York City[1].
The main thing I learned is that exactly what you said is true. When there are rat problems, you have to go to the source. Traps/poison in a localized area is not going to work, as the brown rat is easily able to reproduce faster than we can kill them with those methods.
In fact, certain methods have ended up helping the rats. At one point the city put out thousands of boxes with poison in them. The problem is the boxes were designed to be nice and cozy for the rats, so they'd be tempted to go in and eat the poison. Instead, they go in there and mate. (They also use the boxes to evade predators).
NYC's current strategy is to improve data collection on rats, and then use that data to better enforce standards (like garbage disposal), eradicate burrows, and plant different shrubs that aren't as friendly to rats. You have to fully eliminate the environments that sustain them, you can't exterminate your way out.
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