I overheard a conversation last week from a group of teachers talking about the phone ban:
They had students put their phone in signal blocking bags. But some phones kept searching for signal until they overheated… literally warping the phone screen.
Now they advise students to put it in airplane mode before sticking it in the bag…
I swear the LG G6 I had did this. When I visit family, it's a long drive through some pretty spotty areas and the phone would be hot to the touch and the battery drained faster than usual. As if it's just constantly screaming out into the RF void.
If the closest tower is on the fringe of connectivity, and you've got an app that's acknowledging push notifications constantly or similar, then wouldn't it make sense that it has to scream constantly? Keep in mind that not every push on a data level results in something displaying in your notification tray; these are quite distinct despite the phrase "push notification" commonly being used for the combination of a push coming in and a notification being presented as a result.
Maybe the faraday cage bag in GP's anecdote wasn't quite good enough, so the same thing (fringe connectivity combined with lots of Rx packets needing to be ACK'd) was occuring for both of you.
When you are 100% out of range such that no Rx is occuring at all, then at that point yes the phone should not be screaming into the void often enough to heat up and drain the battery.
Wireless radios boost their gain settings when they have weak or no signal. The firmware devs should be mindful of conserving power in this scenario. Some don't bother.
The middle school our kids go to bans smartwatches as well as phones. If either is discovered, it is confiscated and must be picked up by the parents at the office.
It's a private school. All the parents agree with this policy. It's fantastic for the kids, and for teaching.
I worked briefly in a team teating the BlackBerry thermals. I’d be surprised if this was the case — phones have temperature monitoring, and are designed to manage their functions to avoid overheating. There are set maximums for each external material (glass, plastic, metal), and exceeding those can result in lawsuits. (Which happen regardless…) The phones should have detected the temperature conditions and decreased power to the radios.
I’ve got interesting comparisons of BlackBerry vs Apple on this metric. Different story though.
One, big, problem of our [supposedly] modern life is that we create problems from no where than struggle to find solutions for them.
Regardless of the country, bringing smart phones to schools by students is a critical problem because it has a lot of negative consequences with short attention span caused by short-form videos [1] being one of them. Instead, we can buy our kids classic, dump phone just for calling purposes or, as another commenter already mention, a smartwatch that supports SIM card so your kid can make (and receive) calls if needed.
One of the significant challenges of our so-called modern life is that we often create problems out of thin air, only to struggle with finding solutions for them.
A prime example, no matter the country, is the issue of students bringing smart phones to schools. This has become a serious concern due to the numerous negative consequences it brings. Among the most troubling is the short attention span fostered by the constant barrage of short-form videos [1]. Instead of allowing this, a more thoughtful approach would be to provide our children with classic, dumb phones solely for calling purposes. Alternatively, as another commenter suggested, a smartwatch with SIM card capabilities could be a practical solution, enabling kids to make and receive calls when necessary.
all of our problems are created out of thin air. we literally make up all of our problems.
no one is ever upset about the way things are; they are only upset about the stories they make up about the way things are supposed to be, or are not, or should be, etc.
go ahead and find me something that you are upset about just the way that it is, with no relation to the way that it isn’t. i’ll wait.
Mobile phones are already banned from Greek schools since 2006.
The government issued a new set of cost-cutting changes for this academic year. The most fundamental change is that they merge classes together (at least 25 students) to save money. The teachers are unable to work with such big classes.
"Merging" as in ~25 is the new class size after merge or two classes of ~25 will merge to a new class size of ~50? I never really considered it before but on looking it up it seems some places have average class sizes <20 whereas where I went to school 25-30 was typical so I genuinely don't know which applies in this case.
Even 30 I think worked out towards the later years but, looking back, I have no idea how grade school classes of 25+ held together. 50 would have to be just nuts for all but maybe the final year or two.
having studied in 45-50 student classrooms until high school, i think this has more to do with the sudden paradigm change than anything else. unless there are physical/infra challenges.
I recently heard a discussion of such bans on NPR (I'm not sure which program because I was listening on the car radio during a short trip). They talked to some high school students who were under such bans and most thought it was for the best.
One student did raise a good point though. She said that when she's trying to concentrate like when reading something challenging she would listen to music on her phone via headphones to block distractions. Now that she can't do that she's finding it harder to concentrate.
I wonder if stand-alone music players might make a comeback among students?
Stupid new rules. And I think I'm already being charitable. Of course phones should be banned during class, but not in-between classes.
>Under the new rules, pupils who don't comply will be excluded from school for one day.
The "punishment" is even stupider than the new rules themselves. Kids already do not want to be in school and you're rewarding them with that for breaking a rule.
>Scientific data on how the use of mobile phones during the school day affects the learning process itself, are overwhelming.
If we have such great scientific data on the process of learning then why isn't this being used to improve educational outcomes in general? Greece isn't exactly topping the charts with their performance, nor were the previous high ranking results taking these kinds of steps of banning phones outright. Or days in another way: I very much doubt that we have actual strong evidence on this that isn't muddied by all kinds of other factors.
Considering that teachers can't even spot students that are chatting or cheating during exams, I think this ban is also going to be ineffective.
I swear, most adults have completely forgotten what it was like to be a teenager in school.
Where I grew up, kids were required to attend school until they were 16, but free schooling was available until high school graduation, so nominally about 18.
The number of 17 year olds who voluntarily went to school tells me that a lot of kids want to be in school.
> why isn't this being used to improve educational outcomes in general?
There is overwhelming evidence that environmental lead worsens educational outcomes in general.
That's one of the reasons we have greatly reduced using lead.
Just because the data against lead is overwhelming doesn't mean we suddenly know everything about how to improve learning.
> I think this ban is also going to be ineffective.
We know that such bans elsewhere can be effective.
We know that teens smoke at school too, even though smoking has long since been banned at school, with punishment which includes suspension.
Hungary did the same this month but interesting how it plays out here. Because the current meta of the opposition is "everything Orbán does is bad" so this policy also became an issue like that and every non-Fidesz aligned party, teachers trade union etc is opposing it.
I do not want to go off the deep end but you really lack context here. There's a seriously sick undercurrent to this: this will strengthen the position of school guards. In other words, it's just another pandering to pedophiles.
Fine, let's discuss then the connection between Orban's government and he himself and pedophiles.
Gábor Kaleta was an ambassador to Peru. He was recalled after they found him possessing 19 000 CSAM photographs. He got a suspended sentence and an ~1500 EUR fine.
1. János Vásárhelyi , the director of that place is a convicted pedophile. He is currently in prison.
2. His second, Endre Kónya was convicted because he helped cover up what's going on. He was given clemency by the president who needed to resign when this entire shit came to light. It's important to note he is from Transylvania, an area of Romania where a lot of ethnic Hungarians live. You will see soon why this is important.
3. It's worth mentioning the person pushing for this clemency was Zoltán Balog, a former minister and clergyman who is rather close with Orbán.
4. The brother of Orbán operates a wrestling association in this children's home.
5. Now we need to turn our attention to another Transylvanian Hungarian, a Franciscan friar piece of shit called Csaba Böjte. He is a favorite of the Hungarian government, funded by them, awarded by them. His orphanages were places of torture and sexual abuse for at least a decade and he have pressured the children to shut up. The "teachers" doing this are untrained and one of them got a 28 years prison sentence when Romanian authorities have caught him.
6. The wrestling association have hosted events with Csaba Böjte's children in attendance.
It's not so hard to interpret this as Orbán's brother operating an Epstein island under the guise of wrestling where Böjte supplies the children who doesn't tell anyone just what kind of wrestling is going on there.
In light of this, it's perhaps not surprising the government invented a new kind of policeman: the school guard. These people are almost completely untrained, they get 120 hours (!) before being sent to schools to play security. No one is surprised pedophiles are flocking to this, despite the whole thing is only a few years old already two were arrested and heaven knows how many got away scot-free. This entire phone thing is just going to give them more opportunities to blackmail the children.
It’s news to me that phones were ever allowed. They were to be locked in a locker until after school hours for my entire schooling (punishable by detention and seizure of phone).
The article notes that phones usually weren't permitted in schools, but it was difficult to enforce. Granted, the article doesn't give much reason to believe that it will be any easier to enforce. It suggests that they don't expect full compliance at the outset. Given the penalty is removal of the student from school, I doubt there will be much enforcement unless the phone is used to harass other students or staff. The more sensible solution is likely the one that you were exposed to: seizure of the phone.
The blanket policy used to be “I see it, I take it” by the teachers. That seemed reasonably effective since it allowed them to pretend they didn’t see it at times when it was genuinely an accident.
Aside from the hundred and one obvious reasons that’s a pointlessly complex solution that would cause it’s own problems, if you think about it for even a moment I bet you can come up with some ways for a pocket camera and video game to be disruptive in school even without signal.
Really hard to contain that to a specific area, and you end up interfering with outside the school, possibly preventing people from calling emergency services.
The article says the problem is them recording video of kids bullying other kids, which won't be fixed by signal jamming, plus then you're screwed in an emergency.
But ya, if we were a little more totalitarian we could just flip a few settings in their phone via the school admin control. Do we trust each other or don't we? So schizo.
Cyberbullying is mentioned a lot in this article but it's as the driver for previous set of rule changes around what happens to students who use cell phones in those situations. This new ban largely focuses on the general distraction phones cause, cyberbullying is at most just one small component in that.
You're right in that it's both a modern challenge and one 30 years in need of addressing.
The first girl I "dated" I met in an AOL chat in the 90s where I did what was later called negging. Five years later, my friends were on AIM and torturing each other and everyone they could get the handles of.
A coworker recently told me her tween son had done the same to a classmate via Discord and whatever other socials kids use today, and unlike, or because of, how we grew up, his teachers were aware of it and called his parents. He spent the summer without Internet doing volunteer work until everyone was satisfied, and he's improved because of it.
I don't believe in ubiquitous surveillance, but with the connectivity available today, parents need more options to parent. I think there need to be more options for phones without cameras, more accessible management, and ways to limit that so that there's local privacy for developing people to explore their personhood. Taking phones away isn't a bad way to start until we have that option.
I overheard a conversation last week from a group of teachers talking about the phone ban:
They had students put their phone in signal blocking bags. But some phones kept searching for signal until they overheated… literally warping the phone screen.
Now they advise students to put it in airplane mode before sticking it in the bag…