Banning mobile phones in schools

[Melanius Mullarkey]

29 minutes ago, BillyAnchor said:

Who would call the cops during school shootings?

Install phone boxes in every classroom.

[Salvo Montalbano]

6 minutes ago, The Mantis said:

I'm a retired teacher so thanks for cheering me up  The phones were a large part of me applying for early retirement. There's an element of control freakery with teachers and that's a huge part of the problem - you don't feel in control any more. Especially when some chancer sends a text to their innocent mate just to cause a bit of chaos.
In my experience the boys just carried their phone to save them looking at a watch. The girls - that was another matter entirely...

In my school, the heidie used to rant at assemblies that they were not to bring their phones into school, while we realised it was unworkable, so we used to have an unspoken agreement with the kids that it was ok as long as they didn't take the piss. If a phone went off, or they were caught texting or whatever, the teacher took it to the school office and the pupil collected it at the end of the day (and a letter was sent home iirc). Seemed to work reasonably well. I've heard of schools where it was the parent's duty to come for it.

The summer that I retired they moved into a new building and there was access to wifi for everybody. They also issued iPads to all of S3, which was to trickle down to S3 in the subsequent years. Not sure how that worked out though - I've heard stories about pupils gaming etc when supposed to be working. Mind you, the same thing happened back in the day when you took a class to the computer suite. You had to keep an eye on them having extra windows open to play games.

Fife are finally bringing this in next year (at least that is the plan). Apparently they'll be locked into tools that are for educational purposes only but you know that usually the kids are more technically proficient than the staff and they'll find a way round it. We use laptops etc just now and it's a nightmare constantly patrolling the room to keep an eye on who is doing the work and who is playing games or watching questionable videos.

[19QOS19]

Is the simplest solution not to have a box at the entrance where they can put their phones in and at the end of the class the teacher can hand them back out? 

[dundeefc1783]

3 hours ago, Jan Vojáček said:

 

 

Telling kids not to bring them to school, especially secondary age kids who'll walk to and from school/out at lunchtime etc, is a terrible idea on safety grounds. If I had a kid walking to and from school on their own then I'd not feel comfortable letting them do it without having a phone on them.

 

 

Safety grounds? I'm sorry but kids managed to walk to and from school for years on end without mobile phones and 99.9% would have had no issues at all. I'm must be getting old if we have reached a point where a secondary school child can't leave the house without a mobile phone FFS. 

[Melanius Mullarkey]

4 hours ago, tamthebam said:

the wee sods have their nose in a phone outside of school (like a lot of adults) and are oblivious to what is happening around them. 

Ban them from schools and any idea of fun too. Kids should be made to go out in all weathers at break time like we were too. 

In fact my idea of the perfect school is a bit like this Giles cartoon (we hardly ever got to see any telly programmes either)

 

ONe of these battered against their legs on a daily basis might help.

[Bert Raccoon]

1 hour ago, dundeefc1783 said:

Safety grounds? I'm sorry but kids managed to walk to and from school for years on end without mobile phones and 99.9% would have had no issues at all. I'm must be getting old if we have reached a point where a secondary school child can't leave the house without a mobile phone FFS. 

I think the days of kids getting snatched off the street are much more unlikely than the peado heyday of the 80s with promises of kittens or bags of sweets in the back of a van.

Nonses nowadays are more tech savvy so it would more than likely be online they would meet the peados, most likely through communicating on their phones.

The point is kids were probably much safer before mobiles than they are now when it comes to something like that. 

Obviously if you fall down a well a mobile would be quite useful, reception depending 

[David W]

We use them quite a lot in the class. Scanning QR codes, Kahoot/Blooket, accessing Google Classroom, a quick bit of on the spot research. Or if they've forgotten their calculators, or the stopwatches have ran out of battery (again). Photographing experiments, setting revision reminders. I'd prefer to keep them in all honesty, albeit I get the wider issue with photographing people, social media abuse etc.

The only time I've overly bothered about them is when there's a larger class discussion and someone is sneaking a look, or they've been let out to the toilet and they're taking ages to return to class as they're having a wee browse. They can go in the prison on my desk then (the phone, not the pupil).

[scottsdad]

Not school, but I remember giving a class and a bunch of Indian students were crowded round a laptop watching a cricket match.

[Central Belt Caley]

20 minutes ago, scottsdad said:

Not school, but I remember giving a class and a bunch of Indian students were crowded round a laptop watching a cricket match.

We had a lecturer that banned us from having laptops or phones out in her lectures. Mainly because she caught 4 guys playing Call of Duty together on their laptops

[itzdrk]

The ones that get me are when you get those click bait newspaper articles about kids being sent home for having a haircut or shoes that some Norman has declared unacceptable. 

Or one I remember that's no doubt still going - the concept that a teacher can tell kids they aren't allowed to go to the toilet 

This at least has some sense to it. 

[Alert Mongoose]

9 hours ago, Jan Vojáček said:

If I had a kid walking to and from school on their own then I'd not feel comfortable letting them do it without having a phone on them.

Why? Generations of children managed just fine without doing so.

Arguably, they learnt a bit more common sense in doing so as well.

[craigkillie]

Have teachers not considered just making their lessons more interesting?

[BFTD]

5 hours ago, itzdrk said:

The ones that get me are when you get those click bait newspaper articles about kids being sent home for having a haircut or shoes that some Norman has declared unacceptable. 

Or one I remember that's no doubt still going - the concept that a teacher can tell kids they aren't allowed to go to the toilet 

This at least has some sense to it. 

That's an even bigger deal in America. Some schools there have kids pissing themselves at their desk because the klass kommandant won't give them a hall pass, without which they'll be suspended from school. Seems like they have as many twisted sadists teaching classes as here.

16 minutes ago, craigkillie said:

Have teachers not considered just making their lessons more interesting?

We've educated kids by boring the shit out of them for hundreds of years; why change a winning formula now?

They're just lucky we haven't reverted to the Victorian method of educational reinforcement: beating them senseless after every lesson.

[Jan Vojáček]

10 hours ago, Alert Mongoose said:

Why? Generations of children managed just fine without doing so.

Arguably, they learnt a bit more common sense in doing so as well.

Generations of children managed just fine getting belted for misbehaving too, in fact many probably learned from it, but it doesn’t mean we should’ve kept doing that. Progress.

If they’ve got a phone then they are easier to track if something happens. And have the ability to phone for help. Aye it’s unlikely they are going to get abducted or attacked on the way home, but if it makes them fractionally safer then it’s worth doing. Especially if they’re walking home alone.

I covered a story a few years ago about a young girl who a guy tried to get into his car a few times. She recorded the whole thing on her mobile, you could see the face of the guy and hear what he was saying. And he got convicted. It’s obviously not common, but you’re safer with a phone.

[hk blues]

19 hours ago, steelmen said:

my daughters school has a ban on phones. they need to be in a locked box for the school day... so she uses her watch to message/call home.

Shows initiative - good lass. 

[hk blues]

16 hours ago, dundeefc1783 said:

 I'm must be getting old if we have reached a point where a secondary school child can't leave the house without a mobile phone FFS. 

That's where we are at. 

[hk blues]

15 hours ago, Bert Raccoon said:

Obviously if you fall down a well a mobile would be quite useful, reception depending 

Aye, fair point.

Do many kids fall down wells these days? 

[ICTChris]

When my dad started Primary One in 1949, the teacher made the kids sit with their hands on their head for fifteen minutes after lunch so she could have a nap.  The first time this happened, my dad left and went home, only to be taken back up to the school by his mother, who complained about the teacher.  As my dad puts it, that was his card marked in education.

My parents both tell stories that genuinely take your breathe away about teachers brutally beating children when they were in school.  Plenty of the teachers enjoyed it and made no secret of their enjoyment. 

Parents, of course, also beat their kids as a matter of course.  My dad also tells a story of when his dad, a local policeman, caught him playing truant - he was taken home and belted with the leather strap my grandad used to sharpen his cut-throat razor.  If my grandad was out then my granny would use the cord of the vacuum cleaner to hit the kids.

I have a good friend who grew up in a mining village in Fife in the 1980s.  As she tells it if one of the adults in the village saw a kid from the village doing something bad, they would hit them and then tell their parents, who would also hit the kids when they found out.  Halycon days!

Edited 15 minutes ago by ICTChris

[Alert Mongoose]

47 minutes ago, Jan Vojáček said:

Generations of children managed just fine getting belted for misbehaving too, in fact many probably learned from it, but it doesn’t mean we should’ve kept doing that.

All about opinions, I guess, but that's a horrendously irrelevant analogy to use.