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this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2024
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On the other hand, this is how we know about teachers doing things they absolutely shouldn't do.
I read books in class. I drew pictures in class. I just looked out the window and daydreamed. Kids aren't going to pay attention just because you take away their phones.
EDIT: I'm honestly amazed people are against that. Are you not aware that this is why we have videos like this that expose racist teachers?
https://abc7.com/fontana-sequoia-middle-school-teacher-racial-slur/13092208/
I'm bored and could use the downvotes, so here are a bunch more examples of students filming teachers doing things that are unacceptable or just plain illegal in class because they have their phones:
https://www.wdbo.com/news/news/local/student-films-teacher-whipping-students-belt/nmJzW/
https://www.9news.com.au/world/special-needs-student-films-teacher-s-abuse/5d513c71-22ec-4fc6-9da3-04b72d875a6d
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/student-teacher-qanon-video-shouting-b1951071.html
https://www.yourtango.com/news/video-math-teacher-mimicking-native-american-culture
https://www.yourtango.com/news/california-teacher-robert-bean-threatening-slam-student-against-wall
Wow, that math one! They did the same thing in my kid's math class! It was during Covid, so the teacher recorded it himself without a second thought! I couldn't believe what I was seeing!
I hear what you're saying about recording. But Im not sure phones in class are the answer.
I don't know what other answer there is to stop teachers getting away with this shit. The racism and sexual harassment I saw on display when I was going to school in Indiana in the 80s and 90s was not a secret. But since it was always the teacher's word against the kid's, the teacher always got away with it. The only time I can think of that it didn't happen was when a very devoted girl and her family in my high school spent a lot of time and money in court suing a teacher who sexually harassed her in middle school. He had his job the whole time (he was finally fired when he lost the case).
Security cameras in classes? They have them on busses.
Exactly. If a student doesn't want to pay attention, it won't.
I think the exposing teachers part is even more important. I edited my post to show a link to a student who filmed a teacher being racist above.
Here's another link to another incident to show that isn't a one-off
https://www.kansascity.com/news/state/missouri/article275311416.html
I got all kinds of mistreatment by teachers in school and saw even worse stuff happen to other kids. Racism, sexual harassment, violent threats, etc. But we didn't have phones with cameras in them back in the early 90s, so they got away with it. They can't anymore... unless they ban phones, of course.
EDIT: I don't suppose one of the many downvoters would take the time to explain why giving children the ability to expose teachers like this should be taken away from them in the name of getting kids to pay attention.
To give you a genuine response, it is at least conceivable that the potential harm caused by allowing students with adolescent brains constant access to platforms that are explicitly and intentionally designed to be as addictive and distracting as possible is greater than the positive impact of outing the occasional bigoted teacher.
I'm not saying this is definitively the case because I'm neither a sociologist nor a psychologist, but I think it's fair to say that we can objectively state that this is at least possible.
If it is because people think it's occasional, I hope they've changed their minds now that I've posted 7 links. 5 of them I found within a few minutes of searching (all five in total, not each). The other two I found instantly.
Because I disagree entirely that this potential harm is worse than the actual harm on these videos.
I don't think throwing any amount of links at each other is a particularly productive way of answering the question. I can just as easily find an equal number of reports from teachers saying how keeping kids off their phones is nearly impossible and makes it much harder to actually teach. Plenty of teachers would strongly disagree that social media is merely a 'potential' harm.
Reports from teachers vs. actual video evidence are not really comparable, are they?
Because the former goes back to the old problem of their words against the child's, which is exactly why cameras are helpful.
If there is actually data backing up what those teachers claim, fine. But otherwise we're talking about subjective claims vs. objective video, the latter exposing activity that should be a firing offense at least if not necessitating criminal charges.
Sure thing, here's some random studies.
https://www.edweek.org/leadership/digital-distractions-in-class-linked-to-lower-academic-performance/2023/12
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5648953/
https://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/dp1350.pdf
Students themselves report phones being significantly distracting, including to other people that aren't using them, and there's even evidence that banning phones directly increases student performance, especially amongst low-performing students.
How does this compare against the benefits of exposing teacher bigotry? I won't pretend to know how to quantify that, but I'm not making the positive claim that banning phones is necessarily worth the loss of ability to expose teachers. My only point is that it is plausible that this is the case, and I think I've supplied decent evidence for that. Policy questions very rarely are between "good option" and "bad option", but rather "bad option" vs "worse option".
Okay, that is fair. The original article did not bring any numbers. And that does make me conflicted, but I think after seeing all that I saw going to a red state public school that some sort of way for students to show that their teachers did something they shouldn't have and be believed is necessary as an alternative or we'll go back to what I grew up with.
To be clear, speaking as someone who got to enjoy being a gay atheist teenager going to school in rural Missouri, I get your point. However, negative things that directly impacted me or people like me aren't necessarily more important than negative impacts on other people, and when you're faced with decisions that genuinely do come down to direct trade-offs, you have to take a comprehensive and holistic view.
To throw a stupidly exaggerated example out, if I had a button that would fire every homophobic teacher in the country but also reduce the academic performance of all students by 5%, I personally wouldn't feel comfortable pressing it. Of course on the flip side, I probably wouldn't enjoy being faced with the opposite button that increases all students performance by 5% but also introduces some amount of homophobic teachers. My only point here is that these aren't simple and easy questions.
I guess the main question is if a digital device is inherently distracting or if the issue is how it is used. Also at a certain point a distraction is a tool that can be used for learning too.
I was a privileged kid in a private highschool we didn't have smart phones yet (they came out when I was in college) but we did have laptops in class.
At first we had full Internet access via WiFi. Then the school slowly started to filter traffic by blocking certain sites. So naturally I learned for to install a proxy on Firefox so I could go to addictinggames.com during the especially boring parts of class. I would still take notes (enough to pass all my classes) and some teachers were so entertaining that I never wanted to do anything but pay attention.
Eventually a teacher did catch me playing a game and sent me to the Deans office. He saw all the things I did to circumvent the schools internet filters that he asked if I would like to spend an elective period at the it office. I said yes. So for one period a day I would help students with basic things and I learned a lot from the other guys in the office. I got super into computers and now have a career built on that experience.
Teachers can be shit without being racists: https://youtu.be/ha8RN1iWrug
Not all of the links I provided were racism.