The nation’s second-largest teachers union said Thursday it was losing patience with social media apps that it says are contributing to mental health problems and misbehavior in classrooms nationwide, draining time and money from teachers and school systems.
You don’t have to have patience with it you just have to deal with it.
I also think that it’s a problem that teachers spend to much time on their phones and have mental health problems.
“I may have mental health problems, but you also have mental health problems” does not…strike me as an argument against lessened social media use…
If the instructors were doing this, they’d need to be fired because they are not doing their job. If the students are doing this, well, you can’t fire them from learning, so it needs to be handled at the source.
Would also be pretty neat if we gave the educational system perhaps a money, and the problem is probably exacerbated by all that future the students tangibly don’t have. But a heavy increase in counseling won’t make anyone listen. I vote for addressing both, both is good.
I also forsee a handful of court cases when parents inevitably make their kids’ “non-minor” accounts because they just want to be left alone.
Unfortunately teachers don’t “have to deal with it”
When they get fed up they quit, and then random unqualified people get hired to fill the needs and they end up being the ones who don’t give a shit either way and spend their day on the phones.
You won’t get good teachers if the working conditions are shit, and students these days are the main problem creating the shitty working conditions.
We should make kids sleep at school during the school year with no access to phones or the internet.
We should do the same with you, at your work then, just so you can see how dumb that would be. But only you.
Surely you can understand that person was being facetious? Are people this clueless?
[Edit] I guess we have our answer. People are clueless.
Some people genuinely believe these things, and it’s not a small number. There’s an entire horrific industry around it.
I don’t get why kids are allowed to have phones in the school. Just install signal blockers. Parents can call the office if there is an emergency like it’s 1995.
Signal jammers are illegal. Certainly wouldn’t be a good idea to install those in the US, where school shootings are common.
Edit: Also, unrelated to the signal jamming thing you talked about:
Phones are useful in case of a fight were to occur, which happen very often (at least in schools I went to). Video recordings are good to determine fault. School surveillance cameras are often cheap, blurry, unreliable, have many blind-spots, and also forbidden in classrooms (at least in the US). In addition, sometimes classrooms still use old textbooks that only have 1 class set, and are very heavy to carry, and they aren’t available online, so in that case, kids can just take photos of the textbook and the school saves a lot of money from having to copy-print the textbooks, so maybe they just need to make 1 or 2 copies for the kids that don’t have a phone. Phones are very useful, just needs reasonable rules. A complete ban is not necessary in my opinion.
I agree that they shouldn’t be allowed to have phones during class. It would actually probably be best if the students had assigned classrooms, they stuck their phones in a teacher-controlled box at the beginning of the day, then the teachers move classrooms to teach each subject.
Then the kids get their phones back during lunch and at the end of the day.
I agree. Just have a designated box or place for the students to leave their phones in each classroom. They can grab them in an emergency or on their way to lunch.
Meh… Kids need to learn self control. Who’s gonna hold their phones when they have a job, or during a funeral? Workplace don’t want to be responsible for your phone, and they’ll just fire you if you get caught using your phone during work hours. Also liability problems… what happens if the phones are damaged or missing? What if some creepy pedophile teacher injects spyware in the phones when the kids attention are focused on a test?
If you can’t leave you phone in a backpack for a few school hours, how do you deal with not being able to use your phone at a job which may have even more hours, and which your livelihood depends on?
Depends where you work, everywhere I’ve ever worked in the last two decades haven’t minded you using your phone providing you aren’t spending all day staring at it.
We are starting to see them banned.
In a country where kids drill for school shootings, not having cell phones so emergency calls can be made from anywhere should be a non-starter.
Not sure how that matters. Teachers and other staff could have phones true, but what if a shooting happens in the bathroom? Or in the halls where there are no teachers? Or the teacher is killed first and all the kid’s phones are locked up somewhere?
But to be clear, I don’t think that means kids should be using them during class. I can’t remember where I saw this, but putting boxes on each desk where kids can put their phones that stay there until after class or an emergency is an option. Or just tell them to keep them in their pockets and discipline them if they use them during class.
I’m with you on this. How is having like 300+ more options available (depending on the school) to call the police really something that will help with school shootings specifically. Like if it happens a teacher would call.
People are so paranoid about not having instant connections available at all times. It is not that needed. Especially with kids in school.
Having everything at your fingertips is great, in theory. But for kids without the ability to regulate, it’s as much a distraction than an advantage.
I think the problem there is (likely) more the social media than the phones. I grew up with high schoolers having phones in the classroom in 2009-2013; Twitter and Facebook were the big two, and Instagram wasn’t what it is now. Even then, Facebook & Twitter could kind of suck/cause drama way more than just the more basic things phones can be used for cameras, calculators, web browsers, and messaging family & friends.
“Addictive social media” in particular, is probably where congress’s eyes need to be placed. That sounds like what this union is saying as well doing a quick skim, so 👍👍 .
What were we warned about back in the prime Facebook/Twitter era? Short term dopamine driven feedback loops or some such?
This is the result of not heeding that warning.
You’re right that blaming phones is dumb. The phone is a tool, just like a hammer. You can use a hammer to build something, or destroy something. It’s all about how it’s used.
What we should be fed up with is the influence of teachers and teachers’ unions.
My take on this is my take on school in general: it’s manipulative, coercive, and overall bad for you. I say this having considered becoming a teacher, and having chosen to become a librarian instead precisely because I refused to lend my energy to the school system.
Teachers have a disproportionate influence over the lives of basically everyone. School being compulsory, and most people* not even understanding that alternatives exist let alone having the resources or wherewithal to pursue them, the influence of teachers is very nearly inescapable, and yet they always demand more. More hours, more days, more ceaseless undivided attention (regardless of the quality of their content or the interests of their captive audience), all in direct contradiction to mounting evidence that all of those things are bad for you.
Studies from Europe indicate that homework, for example, at best does nothing at all, and more likely is actively bad for you. (This doesn’t really require modern science – John Holt and John Gatto were writing about this in the 80s – but modern science confirms it.) Students nowadays are subjected to levels of anxiety that would’ve gotten their grandparents hospitalized. The pandemic largely disbanding in-person schooling resulted in a noteworthy drop in student suicide rates. And still, the school system demands more control, more influence, more access to more of young people’s waking lives, seemingly not content until every conscious breath is scheduled and supervised.
And then there are teachers’ unions. Considering how badly teachers are paid and what utter trash their benefits are, it can be observed that the only significant function teachers’ unions serve is to keep bad teachers from being fired. I know it’s only anecdotal, but I have in my own experience observed teachers who re-use the same test papers for literally decades without changing a thing. This might be acceptable in math – math doesn’t change much – but I’ve seen history teachers do this. Fuck’s sake, man. Unions certainly do little enough to guarantee the quality-of-life of teachers making any effort to do their best.
The combination of artificially insatiable demand and utterly dogwater compensation means that the system has an incentive to churn out an unholy number of mediocre teachers, and then never let them be removed no matter how mediocre their service is. This is leaving aside the problem of teachers forgetting that the people across the desks from them are their employers, not their subjects, and the authoritarian attitudes that comes with that.
(I have to include an asterisk * above because when I say “most people” I mostly mean “most parents” – the people actually affected by the failures of the school system are routinely denied any voice whatsoever in the management of that system, and as a matter of course denied any choice about their own education, so we can only talk about the knowledge and ability of people who are at least one step removed from even being involved in the situation, which is it’s own problem, as you might imagine. In no other aspect of life does leaving decision-making in the hands of people unaffected by the consequences of their own decisions lead to good outcomes…)
There’s more I could go into here. The failures of ‘zero tolerance,’ for instance; the root causes of school violence; the almost comedically cruel euphemism that is ‘bullying’; the entire concept of the school-to-prison and school-to-military pipelines. There’s a lot wrong with the idea of giving teachers more influence over people.
I am explicitly not saying that social media is the answer, but I am saying that I can very easily understand the desire – the need – of young people to claw back a few minutes at a time of their own waking lives for themselves.
I kind of wish you’d posted this before your original post, though I appreciate it was significantly more effort to type. You’ve made a number of well laid-out points that I largely agree with, but I’m not sure your original post indicated anything other than teacher and/or union bashing, which was difficult to get on board with!
I really appreciate the response. There are many good points you have. Though I would place much of the blame on school administrators, districts, and politicians that are meddling in the education system rather than teachers. I have family that are teachers and some I wouldn’t trust to teach basic arithmetic.
I personally would weigh teachers opinions heavier than those of the school and district administration as they are front line and see what our children are experiencing directly. I do agree that much of our education system could use reform to be more holistically focused on children’s general life and well-being. Though I consider that an extension of a general reform of our society with a greater push towards better work/life balance, improved social services, infrastructure, housing, etc.
As you’ve eloquently presented, teacher pay and benefits are abysmal. I would rather spend more time and taxes to improve those work conditions rather than condemn the union. I was regularly in classes of over 30 students (mind you, this was 2 decades ago) and decreasing the student:teacher ratio has always been an active topic they are working towards. Whether it’s better to have a lower ratio vs firing bad teachers is up for debate. There have been plenty of studies that show high student:teachers ratios are detrimental to students.
I haven’t spent a lot of time exploring the different schooling theories and styles like Montessori but perhaps another style may be a good change. A lot of parents aren’t aware of the options they have for their children, but that may also have socio-economic barriers that prevent them from being able to make a choice.
