Oh, ffs.

[conuly]

Don't text your kid at school for no damn reason, folks!

If you want that much daily contact with your child - homeschool!

But on another note, every time I see an article about schools having trouble enforcing no-phone policies I keep thinking this: every teen shoplifter knows you can make a simple faraday cage for your tagged goods by lining a bag with aluminum foil. Then you can smuggle your whatever-it-is past the door and not get stopped with a beep. This same principle is why cell service inside elevators sucks - those things are made of metal and it blocks everything.

So, on that note, it should not be impossible to retrofit your school from top to bottom to make cell service too shitty to be worthwhile... and so long as you're using passive methods then it's all legal! (This may also be an option if you're a teacher in a single classroom and expected to decorate. Who says you can't decorate with metal? Line your classroom with cookie tins, guys! Who doesn't want a shiny classroom that, coincidentally, has the worst cell and wifi service in the state?)

Edit: I just googled, and faraday paints and wallpaper are things you can buy. As always, I believe functional engineering solutions are superior than behavioral ones. If you make it so that kids can't text in class then you will no longer have to spend energy trying to stop them from doing it. So, while this might actually not be feasible for a teacher, any school which is really irritated by this should consider trying to find the funding to redo their paint. In my experience, all schools are badly overdue for a paint job anyway. Shove a metal grid over the windows and you will be good to go.

Comments

[cellio]

And those kids will grow into clueless, entitled adults who do not know how to function in the workplace and in society at large. Tethering to mommy and daddy should end sometime soon after toilet training and learning to cross the street. This is ridiculous.

A paint job is a good idea, but schools that actually care about this could also support teachers collecting cell phones and not giving them back. Sure, some rich kid will show up with a decoy phone to turn in, but for most students (and parents) this would work. Students went to school without the ability to instantly phone home for centuries.

[conuly]

A paint job is a good idea, but schools that actually care about this could also support teachers collecting cell phones and not giving them back.

No school is going to support teachers taking away a $500 or more tool and not giving it back, even if it's not necessary. And unfortunately, it is often necessary.

Furthermore, taking away the phone requires time and energy. It requires teachers to see the phone, to tell the kid to get off the phone, to take the phone, to have a place to put it (even if just until the end of the period), possibly multiple times every hour. This is all disruptive, and some kids won't get caught.

If you block the signal from the start, you don't have that hassle. Why give yourself a discipline issue when you can sidestep the entire matter? It's just easier to make it an engineering problem instead of a discipline problem.

It's the same with everything. It's easier to put barriers up on bridges rather than to try to rescue jumpers. It's easier to put a barrier between the street and the bike lane than to rely on drivers to respect a painted line. It's easier to have an IUD than to remember to consistently use a condom - and it's a heck of a lot easier than trying to keep track of your ovulation! It's easier to put the tasty dog treats in a drawer rather than to trust my dog. (My dogs are not trustworthy.)

When you take human behavior out of the equation, you get better results.

[cellio]

Whoops, left out an important part -- "not giving them back until the end of the day". Sigh... brain faster than fingers, apparently.

You're right that managing it becomes a burden, yeah.

[conuly]

That makes much more sense than what you said, lol!

But even giving it back to the end of the day, that means having some sort of system to keep track of whose phone is whose, and putting the onus on keeping the phone safe from theft and damage on the school rather than the students. Plus you get a cluster of kids at the end of the school day - or, worse, in a school with staggered schedules, at the end of each of the last few periods of the day - trying to get their phones. I remember what a nuisance it was for teachers to sign kids' dailies at the end of each period! And what if the teacher leaves before the students, or the student grabs the bus and forgets to get their phone first....

[cellio]

I was imagining something like: phone goes into manilla envelope with student's name, box of envelopes goes to the principal's office for the day, collection becomes part of the dismissal process. But that last step requires staffing, yes. As for it being a chokepoint -- well, you only get caught in it if you tried to use your phone during class, so there's an obvious way to avoid that. :-)

I favor the faraday cage if it works, sure. Windows will be hard. Someone will probably find a way to hack around it. Belt and suspenders.

[conuly]

well, you only get caught in it if you tried to use your phone during class, so there's an obvious way to avoid that.

Don't get caught? Carry around lots of bribe money? Throw a tantrum?

[kengr]

See my reply to someone else for my thoughts on a solution.

One likely tactic to stop parents monitoring what is going on in the classroom is to inform them that they are violating the privacy of both the teachers and of the other students. Which is very much illegal.

While it wouldn't stop *some* parents it'd stop a fair number.

For the more determined ones, you'd need the cellphone spoofing gizmo and the reconfigured routers.

[maju]

The article says parents want constant contact with their kids because they're worried about the kids' mental health. Maybe one reason the kids' mental health is suffering is because they're being watched all the time?

I went to school decades before mobile phones. My sisters and I left home around 8 am and didn't get home until after 4 pm, during which time we had zero contact with our parents.

[conuly]

These people would never dream of calling the office every day and asking for their kid to be paged.

[profiterole_reads]

Same. In middle and high school, there was a phone booth so that we could contact our parents if a teacher wasn't there and we finished way earlier than expected. The school bus system came late (it did the primary school circuit first), so it was great if one of the parents from our village could drive us all home. And that was the only emergency we cared about. lol

[redbird]

If I'd needed to call my parents during the school day, I would have had to go to the school office, or the school nurse if it was medical, and ask them to make the call.

I think what would be needed here in 2024 is the same thing we had in the 1970s and '80s: a phone number parents can call if they really need to get a message to their child during the school day.

[conuly]

I think those still exist, though? I mean, they must.

[the_siobhan]

I can't help thinking that blocking cell phone use is a bad idea in any country that has regular school shootings.

[kengr]

True, but there's a flip side to that. The kids calling out to anywhere *but* 911 can cause problems.

Me, I don't think the faraday cage thing is a good idea. What is needed is a gizmo I can't recall the name of. It acts like a cell phone tower, and the phone connect to *it* because it's the strongest signal.

It then redirects calls. Most calls would get directed to a "cell phone use is prohibited in the classroom" recording. Calls to emergency services (911) would go thru.

And it would be easy enough to set up *some* phones as allowed to go thru anyway (teachers and staff).

Could also intercept *incoming* calls and redirect them to the recording, with an option to connect to the school office.

Might be spendier than the paint, but I suspect not hugely so.

Monitoring chromebooks and the like can be stopped by reconfiguring the wifi routers in the school. Only a limited number of external sites would be allowed (things like wikipedia). Chat and monitoring software would be blocked.

[the_siobhan]

Honestly I like the sound of that solution a lot better. 'Cause reading the article, it's not so much the students' behaviour that they need to regulate, it's the parents.

[conuly]

This is one of several articles I’ve read recently, most of which talk about student behavior.

The redirect gizmo is not legal. Cell jammers are not legal.

However, passive construction methods that result in poor service inside the building are legal. No $11k fine!

[silveradept]

The gizmo is usually called a "stinger" or a "stingray", if I recall correctly, and I wouldn't be surprised at all if it's completely forbidden for civilians to use, since the most common use of such an interception device is for law enforcement to engage in warrantless surveillance (and sometimes, to do it because they bothered to get a warrant first). Giving a school such a thing would give them the ability to read and eavesdrop on all communications going to and from any phones that connected to the device. (Except maybe end to end encrypted communications.) It's a privacy nightmare, even if it came out of the box designed to deny just about every communication protocol that tries to route through it, or to apply filtering so that only some devices can communicate through it.

[conuly]

All such devices are very illegal.

[conuly]

Yeah but that is illegal.

[kengr]

Not necessarily. Such gizmo *can* be nade without the surveilance features (and more cheaply, too!.

I've heard of theaters and other places using something along those lines (as well as cell phone "jammers")

[conuly]

Jammers are very illegal. Anything that actively interferes with radio signals is illegal.

Passive methods are legal. It’s not a crime to have poor reception. It’s just a crime to use a device to interfere with somebody’s ability to send or receive signals. But building materials aren’t a device.

[conuly]

https://www.fcc.gov/general/jamming-cell-phones-and-gps-equipment-against-law

[conuly]

Well we also should have gun control.

[silveradept]

I have my own professional reasons for not wanting schools to become faraday cages, the least of which is that it's really neat to be able to give someone a library card after having been able to create it in front of them.

As is noted, the difficulty seems to be that of the helicopter parent, and both digital tools and environments that mistakenly believe one parent should have the power to dictate the curriculum for everyone else are making that hovering much easier to both achieve and maintain. I wouldn't be surprised if the attitude among the students is "yeah, I don't care, I wouldn't do this, but if I ignore Mom then I have to sit through three hours of being lectured at about how I'm not performing according to her expectations and I need to shape up so I can follow the pathway she's laid out for me, and foisting her off on you spares me the lecture and you only spend an hour with her because you have actual things to do." Perhaps not that self-consciously.

Faradaying the classrooms isn't a solution to pushing back against the idea that educators aren't the experts and parents deserve to see everything that happens in the classroom, but I also don't know what the solution to that problem is, other than enough people risking pissing off their administrators and legislators by telling them to buzz off and let teachers teach.

[conuly]

This is just the most egregious of recent articles on cell phone use by k-12 students.

[silveradept]

Ah, in that context, I see where the solution of making a classroom inhospitable to signal becomes a suggestible one.

Redesigning curricula to take advantage of the 21st century's education needs and available technologies, rather than requiring teaching like all of the students are going to be 19th c. farm or factory workers, would probably be the best solution, but that idea has lots of people with power and funding against it, because that kind of work often results in curricula that cannot be easily quantitatively measured, and that makes politicians (and those that have to deal with politicians) nervous when they don't have "numbers say" answers to "Is or children learning?"

(That, and doing that for education might mean having to invest in the schools of the Poors and black and brown people, rather than finding ways to let the rich kids go to rich private schools and take their government allocations with them.)

[conuly]

I think the bigger problem with education here is a combination of inertia and the inherent slowness of results. People want what they imagine they had, but eversomuchmoreso.

[ioplokon]

I just think it's probably simpler and less invasive to have students put their phones away for the school day & request parents contact the office. I guess probably this is dependent on having a manageable student: teacher ratio, but that is also good for educational outcomes so idk, double win?

I don't think we should spy on kids clever enough to get around this or cut them off from most of the internet. Like idk, I think banning pornhub is probably reasonable, but if a kid wants to use lunchtime to post on an lgbt forum (or discord chat, or wherever kids are these days), they should be able to.

Then again, it's pretty trivial to tunnel around these blocks & that's a good skill to learn, so... there's that. Like... basically, I think explicit blocking is more ethical than quiet surveillance.

[conuly]

I don’t think construction is invasive. Lots of older buildings have bad or no connection simply because that’s how they were built. I think this is less invasive than constantly watching kids to see if they’re sneakily texting friends or listening to music when they’re not supposed to.

[ioplokon]

Threading fail. The construction idea is interesting, I just suspect it wouldn't happen bc it requires capital investment.

[lilysea]

Altho, before using faraday paint etc schools should make sure teachers have access to a landline in the classroom

you don't want a situation where a student has a medical emergency and the teacher can't phone for help because the teacher's phone can't get a signal

[alexseanchai]

I came to say

similarly, if a student's loved one is having an emergency and the student urgently needs to know this, or some such thing, then contacting the student needs to be possible, but contacting the student's phone doesn't need to be, since calling the school main office to have them call the teacher to send the student to the office phone does need to be possible

[conuly]

Which also means the student can get their upsetting message away from all their classmates.

[jack]

That would make a no-phone policy a lot easier, but I'm not sure.

Partly, there's probably times the teacher or the class DO need to look something up.

Partly the risk of not having any way of handling incoming or outgoing emergencies.

I'm thinking more like, have some realistic standard instead of "hoping each teacher can enforce things ad hoc". Eg "require students to turn phones actually off, and repeat it until prime are actually used to it". I think some schools in some countries do do things like that.

I'm also torn because I think overall it's a lot more relaxing and easy to concentrate to not be online, but some people will benefit from "I completely know all this but have to sit through it" or "teacher repeatedly ignores adjustment for disability, parent has good reason to want to listen for a bit". I don't know how to balance those!

[conuly]

1. Ethernet cable on a dedicated computer in the room
2. Classroom landline

[conuly]

(Or they could keep whining about kids these days to every journalist they meet. I don’t really care which method they take. I’m just tired of all the similar articles on the topic . Say what you like about my solution, it would absolutely succeed in cutting in class cell usage.)

[shadowkat]

Okay, they should use these techniques in theaters (movie and otherwise), also in churches. I really wish they'd use them in movie theaters - I'd love nothing better than no one being able to contact their loved ones during a movie. Every time I see a movie - I have an overwhelming desire to smash cell phones.

[conuly]

Okay, I get where you're coming from, but that phrasing is terrible! (And what to do when they bring their loved ones with them?)

[shadowkat]

Sorry I was half asleep when I wrote that above post. I keep dozing off. My sleep addled mind leaves out critical words.

It should be revised to state "I'd love nothing better than no one being able to contact anyone (loved ones or otherwise) by cell phone in a theater without leaving said theater." They can text and call to their hearts desire outside the theater. It's not like they are saying anything critically important anyhow.

[killing_rose]

Okay um. Given the number of people who use cell phones or tablets as accessibility devices or have some variety of medical device that is usually dependent on the cell data network (and if not that, on wifi), wouldn't a Faraday cage paint risk those students ability to communicate, understand lessons or participate?

To say nothing of the folks whose blood sugar needs continuous monitoring or use devices due to afib. (I am very tired. There are many more things I could be citing.)

Connecting specific devices to the cell grid in the first place came about because we went "crap, wifi doesn't exist everywhere, the cell grid mostly does at this point", and also I am extremely exhausted, but wouldn't a Faraday cage also block wifi? (That one I may be wrong on. See: 6.5 hours of sleep and a schedule for the next 8 days that has already made me weep twice.)

I graduated high school in 2007. It was so common for teachers to seize cell phones and you had to track down where it was at the end of the day.

And a real part of me would like us to return to that, but then we're talking about excluding people using mobile devices as accessibility devices informally.

So...while there has to be a possible solution, Faraday cage should not be it.

[conuly]

The cellular network, even today, is not actually universal, same as broadband. A design that depends on constant wifi or cell service is a huge problem. If there are such devices then they really need to be designed not to work that way.

And there's no reason they should work that way. If you're using your tablet as an AAC, why can't you download a program? Why does it have to be hooked up to the internet, which is a constant ongoing cost to the user? If you're using your phone to track your afib device or your insulin, why does it need wifi? Why can't it use bluetooth, which should work fine so long as both devices (say, your phone and your heart monitor, or your phone and your insulin pump) are inside the faraday cage? The cage only stops signals going in or out.

(Edit: Actually, I know what sort of device you're talking about for the afib, and I'm not sure there is a phone option. I remember being surprised when my mother got one that no such thing existed. Unless they've developed an app in the last few years that's probably still the case. Instead, she was instructed to stay by the monitor for eight hours a day - they suggested she do it while sleeping. And then we sent a more detailed report every week by holding the monitor over her chest for a few minutes, but at no point did she need to be sending in a report 24/7. The device in her chest took a recording and then it transmitted via a machine overnight. And I just googled and insulin pumps that connect to the phone use bluetooth as well, not wifi or data - probably because bluetooth is simply better suited for that purpose. Do you have an example of an app that does require internet access rather than being able to be downloaded or using bluetooth? Because I don't want to argue hypotheticals if the actual situation doesn't exist.)

Again, lots of buildings are *already* effectively faraday cages because they were built this way In Ye Olde Days for other reasons. (It's why I can't get any sort of service if I'm sitting in my back hall.)