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Comment by noobermin | Hacker News Reader

This is such a luddite view and frankly almost a power tripping view. Have you thought that they are "addicted" to being social with their friends like normal teenagers are? It already is against policy in most places to have smart phones during class, why ban them during breaks?

It's during freaking breaks. How about let kids be kids for once and stop trying to grope into their personal lives! Why do you need to police their breaks too? How is this not a civil rights issue?

As millenials and gen xers age, they are forgetting they were kids once and are quickly becoming twice the son of hell authoritarians their parents were.

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Take a breath. My students have full access to their devices during breaks. They have full access to their friends. They have significant opportunists throughout eh day to socialize. That's not really a problem.

The ability to maintain some sustained attention to a task is a pretty fundamental developmental skill that I - as an educator - am tasked with helping my students develop. Many of my student display a compulsive behavioral need to be on their phones and this has very obvious and immediate impacts on their focus and learning. That's a problem that I don't see being solved at the high school level by casual/cultural policing of behavior during class.

The break thing is a reference to the ban. The second sentence of the article is "Children will be allowed to bring their phones to school, but not allowed to get them out at any time until they leave, even during breaks." So the ban sounds like your current situation, plus a ban on using phones during breaks.

Your comment seems to be lashing out vs. actually addressing the parent comment. The user you are responding to already acknowledged the students are "addicted" to being social and using social media because that is the nature of being a teenager.

> "Of course, using phones in class is already against school policy, but it will remain and issue until I am able to take a phone away from a student. "

They also noted that using a phone in class is against policy but they have no way to enforce this policy... which is their reason for supporting a ban.

noobermin's comment makes sense and is reasonable when applied to germinalphrase's comment in light of the article itself, which includes in the ban the use of phones during breaks. germinalphrase's comment says "I would strongly favor a ban" and it is reasonable for noobermin to assume that they are referring to the ban in the article, since no exception was made in the original comment for this (although in an uncle post to this germinalphrase does clarify).

I know it's bad form to object to people downvoting your own comment, so I will do it on the GP's behalf.

I get where you're coming from but if they're spending their breaks on their phones, they're only interacting with their friends through text rather than face to face. They're still kids and we don't know yet whether that face-to-face interaction they're missing out on will be important to them later in life.

It's not about restricting their freedom, it's about health. It's not a "civil rights issue" if you restrict your kids from eating nothing but greasy burgers every day.

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