Greece announces new rules banning mobile phones in schools from September
euronews.com
euronews.com
I overheard a conversation last week from a group of teachers talking about the phone ban:
They had students put their phone in signal blocking bags. But some phones kept searching for signal until they overheated… literally warping the phone screen.
Now they advise students to put it in airplane mode before sticking it in the bag…
Maybe the faraday cage bag in GP's anecdote wasn't quite good enough, so the same thing (fringe connectivity combined with lots of Rx packets needing to be ACK'd) was occuring for both of you.
When you are 100% out of range such that no Rx is occuring at all, then at that point yes the phone should not be screaming into the void often enough to heat up and drain the battery.
It's a private school. All the parents agree with this policy. It's fantastic for the kids, and for teaching.
I’ve got interesting comparisons of BlackBerry vs Apple on this metric. Different story though.
Regardless of the country, bringing smart phones to schools by students is a critical problem because it has a lot of negative consequences with short attention span caused by short-form videos [1] being one of them. Instead, we can buy our kids classic, dump phone just for calling purposes or, as another commenter already mention, a smartwatch that supports SIM card so your kid can make (and receive) calls if needed.
One of the significant challenges of our so-called modern life is that we often create problems out of thin air, only to struggle with finding solutions for them.
A prime example, no matter the country, is the issue of students bringing smart phones to schools. This has become a serious concern due to the numerous negative consequences it brings. Among the most troubling is the short attention span fostered by the constant barrage of short-form videos [1]. Instead of allowing this, a more thoughtful approach would be to provide our children with classic, dumb phones solely for calling purposes. Alternatively, as another commenter suggested, a smartwatch with SIM card capabilities could be a practical solution, enabling kids to make and receive calls when necessary.
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1. https://jolt.richmond.edu/2024/03/06/tiktok-brain-can-we-sav...
no one is ever upset about the way things are; they are only upset about the stories they make up about the way things are supposed to be, or are not, or should be, etc.
go ahead and find me something that you are upset about just the way that it is, with no relation to the way that it isn’t. i’ll wait.
The government issued a new set of cost-cutting changes for this academic year. The most fundamental change is that they merge classes together (at least 25 students) to save money. The teachers are unable to work with such big classes.
Even 30 I think worked out towards the later years but, looking back, I have no idea how grade school classes of 25+ held together. 50 would have to be just nuts for all but maybe the final year or two.
Probably will set a minimum of 25 when possible with 30ish as a maximum
One student did raise a good point though. She said that when she's trying to concentrate like when reading something challenging she would listen to music on her phone via headphones to block distractions. Now that she can't do that she's finding it harder to concentrate.
I wonder if stand-alone music players might make a comeback among students?
How about headphones whose sole function is noise cancellation ? What's the minimum size & cost ?
>Under the new rules, pupils who don't comply will be excluded from school for one day.
The "punishment" is even stupider than the new rules themselves. Kids already do not want to be in school and you're rewarding them with that for breaking a rule.
>Scientific data on how the use of mobile phones during the school day affects the learning process itself, are overwhelming.
If we have such great scientific data on the process of learning then why isn't this being used to improve educational outcomes in general? Greece isn't exactly topping the charts with their performance, nor were the previous high ranking results taking these kinds of steps of banning phones outright. Or days in another way: I very much doubt that we have actual strong evidence on this that isn't muddied by all kinds of other factors.
Considering that teachers can't even spot students that are chatting or cheating during exams, I think this ban is also going to be ineffective.
I swear, most adults have completely forgotten what it was like to be a teenager in school.
Where I grew up, kids were required to attend school until they were 16, but free schooling was available until high school graduation, so nominally about 18.
The number of 17 year olds who voluntarily went to school tells me that a lot of kids want to be in school.
> why isn't this being used to improve educational outcomes in general?
There is overwhelming evidence that environmental lead worsens educational outcomes in general.
That's one of the reasons we have greatly reduced using lead.
Just because the data against lead is overwhelming doesn't mean we suddenly know everything about how to improve learning.
> I think this ban is also going to be ineffective.
We know that such bans elsewhere can be effective.
We know that teens smoke at school too, even though smoking has long since been banned at school, with punishment which includes suspension.
Should we get rid of smoking bans then?
Downvotes?
Fine, let's discuss then the connection between Orban's government and he himself and pedophiles.
Gábor Kaleta was an ambassador to Peru. He was recalled after they found him possessing 19 000 CSAM photographs. He got a suspended sentence and an ~1500 EUR fine.
The children home at Bicske, the next village to Orban's hometown Felcsút https://maps.app.goo.gl/oki8i7H4ijsLja977 is some truly dark shit. Let's see the facts.
1. János Vásárhelyi , the director of that place is a convicted pedophile. He is currently in prison.
2. His second, Endre Kónya was convicted because he helped cover up what's going on. He was given clemency by the president who needed to resign when this entire shit came to light. It's important to note he is from Transylvania, an area of Romania where a lot of ethnic Hungarians live. You will see soon why this is important.
3. It's worth mentioning the person pushing for this clemency was Zoltán Balog, a former minister and clergyman who is rather close with Orbán.
4. The brother of Orbán operates a wrestling association in this children's home.
5. Now we need to turn our attention to another Transylvanian Hungarian, a Franciscan friar piece of shit called Csaba Böjte. He is a favorite of the Hungarian government, funded by them, awarded by them. His orphanages were places of torture and sexual abuse for at least a decade and he have pressured the children to shut up. The "teachers" doing this are untrained and one of them got a 28 years prison sentence when Romanian authorities have caught him.
6. The wrestling association have hosted events with Csaba Böjte's children in attendance.
It's not so hard to interpret this as Orbán's brother operating an Epstein island under the guise of wrestling where Böjte supplies the children who doesn't tell anyone just what kind of wrestling is going on there.
In light of this, it's perhaps not surprising the government invented a new kind of policeman: the school guard. These people are almost completely untrained, they get 120 hours (!) before being sent to schools to play security. No one is surprised pedophiles are flocking to this, despite the whole thing is only a few years old already two were arrested and heaven knows how many got away scot-free. This entire phone thing is just going to give them more opportunities to blackmail the children.
Yet if a student films a teacher going about her business in a classroom literally nothing will happen.
But ya, if we were a little more totalitarian we could just flip a few settings in their phone via the school admin control. Do we trust each other or don't we? So schizo.
Prisons can’t even jam cell phones.
Cheap solution that won't work, but they need to do something: take children's phones away.
The first girl I "dated" I met in an AOL chat in the 90s where I did what was later called negging. Five years later, my friends were on AIM and torturing each other and everyone they could get the handles of.
A coworker recently told me her tween son had done the same to a classmate via Discord and whatever other socials kids use today, and unlike, or because of, how we grew up, his teachers were aware of it and called his parents. He spent the summer without Internet doing volunteer work until everyone was satisfied, and he's improved because of it.
I don't believe in ubiquitous surveillance, but with the connectivity available today, parents need more options to parent. I think there need to be more options for phones without cameras, more accessible management, and ways to limit that so that there's local privacy for developing people to explore their personhood. Taking phones away isn't a bad way to start until we have that option.