The Digital Gap Between Rich and Poor Kids Is Not What Was Expected
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
For example, in one app they have to enter answers to homework, but the app does not allow you to edit the answers once entered. So, my kids have learned to write their answers in a google docs, and then cut / paste when they are really done.
Oh, they also learn that the school IT guy reads their email if they use naughty words in it. Also there is a perennial question of whether the iPad spys on our home network when they are home..
They should start using archaic and foreign curses.
Source: my 13 year old little brother was recently expelled for YouTube videos on his personal google account. As if he had committed a crime. Its asinine.
School administrators are using the existence of any videos to kick him out by all means necessary. They don't care about the contents or the context. He said the word Hitler in one of his 10 ish videos or a joke about it. He's extremely into history and all he likes watching are youtube history videos. Playing games based on history. Sharing memes with his friends that have a historical context. Some of it isn't funny some of it is.
Doesn't make it ok to permanently ruin a teenagers academic future over a stupid silly completely explainable video less than one minute long.
Alternative school is for kids with legitimate behavior issues. He doesn't have any. It's just straight abuse to be completely honest. It's not right.
Responsible school administrators do not waste money/time on free speech lawsuits unless (a) they are dead-to-rights certain that they will win, or (b) there is some other incredibly important issue (e.g., an innocent teacher's professional reputation as in Sagehorn v. Rogers, where the lawsuit -- even if lost -- sends an important signal).
Lawsuits are EXTREMELY expensive, not just in dollar terms (which may or may not matter regardless of the outcome; larger school districts have insurance, retainers, often even in-house legal staff) but also -- perhaps more importantly -- in staff time/energy and public relations terms.
Furthermore, there is a lot of grey area in current court precedent re: student free speech on the internet. SCOTUS hasn't made a single peep about this issue. This, combined with the above fact about lawsuits, works in your favor. Lawsuits on contentious and undecided questions tend to get national attention and can therefore take on a life of their own in school board elections, upsetting an otherwise friendly board. Top administrators know this risk. If the issue is really as minor as you're making it out to be, and serves as a good test case for student free speech on the internet, no superintendent in his right mind would risk a friendly board over some dumb internet video.
Furthermore, the circuit courts that have spoken on this issue made many free-speech-friendly decisions; in particular, the second circuit proposes a test that your brother's school will almost certainly have a very hard time passing [1, page Page 16 of 18, top paragraph].
So, I would advise your brother's legal guardian to take the following steps:
1. Write an email to the superintendent expressing their belief that this is a highly inappropriate and very possibly unconstitutional attack on their child's free speech rights. Request a meeting in person. Emphasize that if this issue is not resolved soon and in your child's favor, your next step will be to consult with lawyers.
2. If no dice, contact your school board representatives and explain that you think the administration is over-reaching. Contact them individually and, if possible, in person. A single sympathetic board member can create enough political head-aches for administration to back off.
3. In parallel, contact the regional ACLU. If you don't have luck, try the bar association. If you don't have luck, find a lawyer who provides free consultations and get a sense for how grey your case is.
IANAL, but have some personal experience in this: I had a somewhat similar issue in high school, back when the internet was just becoming mainstream. There was literally zero legal precedent on public school first amendment internet speech issues. Literally not a single case. Is this Tinker land? Is the speech happening at school, outside of school, or both? After all, you can access websites at school. Does whether or not people actually accessed the website at school determine if Hazelwood applies? Etc.
Oh, and this was also before Morse v. Frederick, so administrative reach beyond the schoolhouse doors regardless of internet wasn't even well-understood. (BTW, Morse v. Frederick probably actually works in your brother's favor, unless his video was about Hitler doing drugs.)
Lots of opportunities for the school to lose.
Fortunately, my parents were supportive and the district decided they had better things to spend money/effort/PR on than a test case on the extent of student free speech in the emerging internet age. Good thing for them, because there was an almost identical case less than 2(?) years later with a six-figure settlement against the district. Emailing that decision to the power-hungry admin who tried to suspend me was probably the most passive aggressive email I've ever sent.
[1] https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/USCOURTS-nynd-3_12-cv-01888/pd...
BTW: my children will NEVER use school-issued laptops unless/until SCOTUS rules that Hazelwood doesn't grant censorship rights just because the speech is typed out on a government-owned keyboard.
>Alternative school is for kids with legitimate behavior issues
it sort of depends on where you go but really that's a misconception. alternative schools are simply that: an alternative to the institutional apathy & intellectually demoralizing environment provided by our modern schools. facilitating a broader array of learning styles can be highly beneficial to those with behavioral problems or disabilities but it is especially empowering for the type of highly intelligent & creative kids who find themselves at odds with the administration & dispassionate structure of our industrial education model.john taylor gatto's criticisms really hit the nail on the head in my opinion. >https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpycMRTBrfY this sounds like another case of a highly engaged kid being driven out of a school that doesn't deserve what he has to offer. if that absurd & failing system doesn't want him, then all the better.
Second, in most districts, alternative schools really are a strictly inferior experience for students who do not have special intellectual, behavioral, or emotional needs.
I'm sure there are exceptions, but this is definitely the rule. E.g., how many alternative schools offer Calc BC?
Alternative schools are great, but in the case parent described, they're probably the strictly inferior option.
EDIT: I should say that I can think of two ways they can argue this: since it is school property, nothing on there has the expectation of privacy, and is monitored (my work does that, and as a result I don't log into personal email at work). They could also argue the "in loco parentus", in which they are acting as parents by searching it.
However, legally or not, that is a massive breach of trust, and if I were that kid, I have been taught a hard lesson not to trust electronics I own and not to trust authority figures.
This doesn't bode well for the "Are schools daycares or for skill development?" debate.
Completely anecdotal, but I was chatting with a teacher a couple of months ago, and she said it's actually a common thing with young children that have been raised on screens. They are addicted to their devices and have poor socialization skills, so they tend to throw tantrums when asked to put the devices away to focus on the class itself.
We actually told her that Masha went on vacation, and are going to be trying to crank down her screen time down to near-zero (from a few hours on the weekends, and occasionally 45 minutes after daycare if only one parent is home and e.g. dinner needs to be cooked)
Is the daycare cooperating with your desire for near-zero screen time?
What did parents do before that when they need to cook dinner?
I know this is kind of a rhetorical question, but:
- they'd prepare dinner ahead of time
- the other parent would watch the kids
- they'd have extended family watch the kids
- they'd have neighbors watch the kids
- they'd park the kid in the kitchen
- they'd hope that the kid didn't do anything too destructive in the other room
- toss them outside and task them with entertaining themselves until dinner is done
You can't do that anymore with other parents calling the cops if they see a child outside unattended for longer than 30 seconds but it was effective
We bordered on a large plot of forest. So we'd pay attention if it was hunting season (wear orange/yellow if it was), and go traipsing through the forest. We would routinely be gone for hours. Some times, we'd go from sunrise to sunset.
We'd also build a tiny fire, and have cookouts. One of us had a rifle, so we'd go for small game. First time I had squirrel was doing that. We put out the fires like they told us to do in cub scouts.
(Tl;Dr. Kids with guns, fire, basic camping gear, out for hours)
There's no way in hell anything remotely like this would be "allowed" today.
But yes it was critical asked. Im a software engineer but with quite a negative view on mobile phones.
I close my lit or put my phone away at conferences and try to focus. Still so many people around me doing everything but concentrating on the topic is strange.
If our generation is already like this, how will be a generation growing up without?
You also had - well, have - the option to just drop the kid in a high-chair or a playpen with a couple of distracting objects in the corner of the room. Sometimes the kid gets unhappy about being in a playpen with nothing to do and just screams for an hour while you prepare dinner.
Then you either have the option of stopping to sooth the baby or power through, and everyone wonders why either dinner is late/burnt or why you're in such a foul mood after listening to a screaming infant for an hour.
He was kind of ADHD person, never confirmed by anyone, but he was jumping in place everytime something exciting was on the screen, always wanted to move around, hit other people. And most noticeable - he was furious when somebody told him to turn off tv/pc.
I've seen many not behaving kids of course, this one had uncontrolled access to technology even then.
And now we're alarmed? We had a lot of time to notice. Don't forget that TV and computer isn't something new. People were addicted to mobile phones (without internet of course, just SMS) even 10 years ago.
Did your cousin carry the TV around with him?
> TV and computer isn't something new. People were addicted to mobile phones even 10 years ago
It used to be rare to see teenagers with cell phones, let alone toddlers. The iPhone is ~11 years old, and in that time it has become common for me to see people of all ages, from toddler up, always on a smartphone or tablet.
I disagree strongly that the situation is just the same as TVs decades ago.
And I'm not interested in the picture of the people reading newspapers on the subway. It's always been common to ignore strangers of public transit, I'm more interested in a photograph of friends/family staring intently at their own newspaper while at a dinner table or some other social event. This is the norm with smartphones, and color me skeptical that it isn't new.
I've learned to keep my kids' screen time limited and it works best if it's a rigid timing (after homework but before dinner). I give them additional time if they watch in French audio track - in fact that seems to minimize the crankiness when its time to put away the devices.
The issue with screens is due to the addictive quality of experiences on screens (tuned by highly paid experts to increase "engagement"!) causes more people to turn to their screens than would otherwise be distracted by other things, such as newspapers.
So instead of tolerating your child's soccer game because bringing and reading a newspaper would be a hassle, seem antisocial, and not be that much more interesting, one can just whip out their pocket computer and have some bright colorful beep-boop gamified but ultimately meaningless experiences much more engaging than the game.
It's like the argument about students starting out the window, or at a ceiling, during a lesson. The answer is not to remove the windows, nor is "scolding the ape" a good solution. The real answer is to compete on engagement, and make the lesson more interesting than what's outside the window.
Likewise, the way to have more people engaged in a sporting event is to make the game more engaging. But then more people yell obscenities at the referee.
In the end, all of this "screen time" nonsense is just a dumb way for some people to feel better than other people.
Powering through boring material is an important life skill. You can be bored to tears by your boss or your job but you still have to do it.
A person will learn better from an engaging teacher, but someone with no experience learning from dry content will be woefully unprepared for that first experience.
Which reminded me of my time on a school board -- the parents wanted all sorts of things that the actual teachers/educational experts thought wouldn't help. Each time I looked into these suggestions the obvious excuses of teacher laziness/dogmatism didn't appear to be the case; it was mostly parents who'd talked to someone or seen some article or simply "just knew".
As a med student, this reminds me of how medical practices will chase patient satisfaction at the expense of all else
In a previous life, I worked at quite a few schools (public and private) as a consultant. How the parents would react and what they thought was always priority number 1. The second priority was how the students would react, because if they reacted negatively, then the parents would inevitably get involved. I've seen this from K-12 from all over the US.
I also have had a lot of teachers and administration say that their biggest issue was making sure the parents were happy with everything. A few even said that it didn't matter what the kids thought, as long as their parents thought one way or the other.
/not every school is like this so ymmv, but a depressingly large amount was. This was 5 years ago, but I really doubt anything has changed.
Same with screen time - staring at cute animal videos and other junk is not the same as using the screen for a quality education. Quality education (still) needs a lot of human guidance which is getting increasingly more expensive (at least relative to an abundant screen time)
It's just like golden eye, but now you've got to pay to play as odjob.
Studies disagree. Too much screen time isn't great for kid development. At best, we're not sure what sort of effect it has on kids.
Part of the reason is that showing a child a TV screen isn't the same as injecting heroin directly into their brainstem; the effects aren't super drastic, and researchers are reluctant to come out and say that X absolutely causes Y, when there's only some correlation, and it's not obvious.
We _know_ that eating a bunch of cyanide will kill you. We don't know exactly what sort of effects watching TV will have on you, because it's not quite so directly causative.
Anyway, we do know and suspect a lot of stuff:
https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2014/08/28/343735856/kids-an...
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/behind-online-behavi...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alicegwalton/2018/04/16/how-too...
Meanwhile, keeping a kid off a screen and giving them other activities is expensive, in parental time if not direct cost.
I don't know if it's education directly, or income, or anything else because those are all correlation. If I had to guess, and this is a guess, is that the deciding factor is whether parents have decided their kids are simply a cost (something to be fed, entertained, educated, etc) or an investment. When a kid always wants your attention, and you view them simply as a consumer, it's easy to just hand them a digital device and ask them to get lost. It's much more work to sit down with them and play a game or read together.
If they get addicted, az least it could make them smarter
You can get basically disposable tablets at Walmart for ~$50.
Some 30 years ago, in my country the parent instructions to their kid, for the afternoon, would be: "go outside, play with other kids, I don't want to see you inside before supper".
And all was well. Sort of.
We've minimized her screen time (she gets ~1hr TV per week and no phone/tablet/computer time outside school) and the result is she knows how to entertain herself with drawing, writing, reading, or just playing.
My kid is still entertained by typing words and sentences onto my computer (the one computer activity I've occasionally let her do). It feels like the window for her to be entertained by typing in commands and seeing them do something is still open ... but maybe not for long.
Unfortunately, many of the "hackable computer for kids" products like Kano assume a full UI, Internet access, etc. Which seem like a counterproductive distraction.
Relevant HN discussion about boot-to-BASIC: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18228740
If that's what it takes then so be it. I don't have time to be watching every last move so I just nuked it all at once. Oh well.
Being able to create such fine grained control on ios seems ... unlikely
And the solution was to take away the thing he liked most? Did this actually help anything for him, or do they just not have to deal with him having a fit now?
I learned this in college back when laptops were expensive and relatively rare.
I admit that it's easy to just use screen time for distractions. But not everyone does and there is an increasing quantity of learning material available nowadays.
It's actually become hard to find quality material because of the quantity available.
Also: taking notes with a pen takes ages. typing is quicker and needs less attention
I still hope one day we can find a way to tie productivity into the addictive brain centers of the brain. Ideally customizable such that whatever you want to be productive on, be it work, exercise, study, etc, we can use that system to achieve our goals.
Our brains do not seem designed for this age of entertainment overload. We need help, and it's becoming increasingly concerning. I hope we can hack our brains to do good, because largely our efforts seem to be going to "bad".
Unsure if this is in praise of writing or of typing, or if it is a neutral statement.
I much prefer paper note-taking, except for its inconvenience. I notice better retention when I use pen and paper. When I take notes on a computer, I'm taking dictation, rather than processing what I hear.
just writing it down was pretty much useless for me. but everyone has their own way of remembering, i'm sure just writing it down with a pen works for you.