Comment by flat-pluto | Hacker News Reader

Comment by flat-pluto | Hacker News Reader

I'm in favour of keeping phones away from students during school hours - Yondr pouches or storing them in a locker makes sense. It's very unlikely that there will be an emergency that warrants the immediate attention of a school student as it is. Plus, in my high school parents could call in to the school landline to speak to their kids if need be.

Teachers have a difficult job as it is, not to mention that they are already mistreated - they have almost no authority over students since they never have backing from parents or school administrators.

I recently came across a post on Reddit[1] where a student pepper sprayed her teacher because he confiscated her phone during an exam. One of the commenters claimed that the same teacher was previously punched in the face by a different student for taking their phone away after catching them cheating on a test. It is disconcerting to say the least.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/facepalm/comments/1397n4l/teacher_t...

A phone contains private photos, conversations, has authorized access to email, chat and social media accounts, it's a second authentication factor, it has payment cards, saved passwords, browser history, potentially health data (for example, period tracker and medication notification app) and other data that they might not want anybody else to access, or could even cause them problems if the wrong person saw some of (which doesn't mean it'd be something illegal or inappropriate - but some teachers have really weird ideas about how the life of a student should look).

Touching it without permission is unacceptable. Ask the student to put it away, pull them out of the class if they don't - but don't touch the phone.

Honestly the sovereign student BS needs to stop. If it's disrupting the class the student needs to answer for that. The student isn't being asked to open the phone, just to put it away.

If I were a teacher I'd ask the student to power the phone down and put it on my desk face up. Of course, teachers have to do tons that have nothing to do with pure instruction - they're essentially running an org of 20-30+ kids all day.

That's what I said - ask them to put it away, pull them out of the class, but don't touch the phone.

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