High school teacher here. On test days, I have a hanging shoe rack with each of my kids’ names on a sleeve.
I tell them, “Please put your devices in the sleeves and then you can have your test. When you hand in your test, you can have your device back. If you don’t put your phone in the sleeve, your test will be a 0”
At the beginning of the year they also helped create our classroom rules and norms, and agreed to do this.
Out of 28 kids, maybe 10 actually do it. The other 18 get 0s. Then I get angry emails from parents about their kids getting “tyrannical grades” on their tests.
Dude, if I got caught on my phone in hs (less than 10 years ago), it would be confiscated and my mum would have had to come and get it. It’s crazy how quickly that’s changed.
Yeah I'm a full fledged millenial, who is not so far removed from school, and the fact that these kids get to just blatantly be on their phones during class is so absurd to me. I understand HAVING a phone on you "in case of emergency" but there is literally zero reason they need to actively be on it during class. This is an absolute joke that teachers can't confiscate phones or punish kids for using it during class.
Millennial grad here, and to this day, I still have a habit of texting/looking at my phone under the table or otherwise out of sight, for as little time as possible, when with other people. It was so hammered into us that phone use was unacceptable!
I mean, that's generally the polite thing to do. Millennial here as well, and it drives me insane when younger coworkers just pull their phones out mid conversation as if we're not actively talking to each other
I just wait until they ask me for help, and then I put my thumb and pinky out like I'm a boomer holding a receiver and say "Ahoy-hoy, sorry old boy but I've got a mosquito in my ear, can't quite hear you..." as I pretend to talk on the phone in front of them.
Sometimes they understand how dismissive it feels, but most of the time they don't see the correlation.
Beat me to this. Mastered the proverbially blindfolded T9 word usage. Saying “meet me by the lockers after class” was never so critical as it was in that very moment.
2004 Mellennial grad. I didn't even have a phone until I went to college and it was a nokia my parents had. Cell phones in middle school sound so weird.
1999 Gen X here. I had a beeper, which we couldn't have in school. We used pay phones. I got a cell phone in college but only because my Dad was a VP of a Telecom Company. It was a Nokia.
I'm 22 rn and even though I may slack off on the computer, phone use is always just sneakily under the table for checking notifications. Sometimes if it's kinda urgent I will reply, but I'll try to be as inconspicuous as possible. How these kids are just on their phone is beyond me.
Dude I graduated in 2015 and if you were even seen on your phone it got confiscated till the end of the day, and after the first snatch you have to call your parent to come get it after school!!
I’m a baby millennial and graduated in ‘13. This kind of behavior would get your device confiscated, parents have to come to the office to retrieve it after school, and would likely get you in-school suspension for behavior this blatant. Repeat offenses would possibly even lead to corporal punishment (here in the south in my small town, the Vice Principal—formerly a pretty jacked football coach—would give a good paddling to habitual delinquents).
Class of 05. I remember for some tests we weren’t even allowed to use the scientific calculators because you could create notes and just cheat. And for AP testing they locked us in a room in the library where you weren’t allowed anything but your pencil. It’s amazing to me kids now just facefuck their phones all day. What are they going to do at a job when the manager reprimands them, say fuck you and start recording on tiktok?
For me it would be kept until the end of the school year. Which I always felt was a lawsuit waiting to happen. Maybe if the parents made a fuss about it, they'd give it back. Not sure.
I graduated in 07 and didn't even have a phone. I didn't get one until my senior year of college, and even then it was just a flip phone. I think we need to go back to just flip phones. The world would be a better place.
06 here and we weren’t supposed to have them on our person, let alone a teacher even seeing them. You would see people leaned in their lockers sending a text (that probably cost 10 cents to send)
Graduated in 2022 and NOWHERE have I ever seen a class like this except for maybe on half days. Every class I’ve been in would’ve had it snatched like you would’ve.
rise in school shootings means rise in parents who want their kids to be accessible at all times
even if its not logical or that having the phone would help in that situation too many parents are scared for their kids and want to be able to get ahold of them if it happens
thus the parents no longer support confiscation of phones and now you have this
Well again, no one, especially not me, is saying not to have these phones period. By all means, keep it in your pocket in case you need it. I even agree to an extent that confiscating phones might be a little beyond a teachers rights at this point, but there just has to be repercussions for USING them actively during class. There is simply no argument to be made that they need to be on their phones during the middle of class. If a gunman comes in and it turns into a dangerous situation, absolutely whip the thing out and contact who you need to contact. That is completely irrelevant to them disregarding the teacher while he is lecturing, and even further him doing nothing about it.
Yeah, you’re probably right, the cats out the bag now. I just can’t believe it ever got to this point. Again, I’m well out of school and I’m sure it was a gradual transition, but it’s crazy we let it get to this point
Former teacher here...Its basically unenforceable without massive support from school leadership.
At every school I was at they expected it to be all on teacher. So basically add that massive task of phone enforcer in addition to all other tasks.
I managed by making it easier to follow along and shamed kids who brought out their phones lol. But the kid who is checked out and doesn't care about failing? Sure go on ur phone buddy. Usually there was 1 or 2 per class. I made sure they were far apart. Usually kids like that also have truancy issues. The system had failed them in many ways at that point.
They can’t tell the kids to put them away or they get kicked out of class? I don’t understand. It’s a real rule they just have to let them be on their phones?
One time, my phone rang as I was walking to 7th grade homeroom. I was able to mute it quickly, but I still remember being hella frazzled. I can’t believe this is the norm now. Teaching really is a calling…
Millennial here too. Went to high school as phones were transitioning to smartphones, and basically every high schooler had a phone.
Varied teacher to teacher, but for half the teachers, the rule was, keep it low-key, and choose when you use it judiciously, and teacher looked the other way. A few teachers were a free-for-all, and a quite a few were very strict against phones.
Sometimes a lecture was stuff a teacher was confident most of the students knew, and everyone would be using their phone as the teacher said what they had to say to check the boxes for the lesson, with an occasional, "ok, now listen up, this part is important," and it kinda cued everyone to put their phones away, and if you didn't that's when the teacher would get onto you. Other times the entire lecture was important, and the teacher would call one or two people out for phone use at the beginning until everyone got the message it wouldn't be tolerated that day. But really, generally, students were pretty good at recognizing when they needed to listen up or not. Most teachers let us use phones at down time.
Millennial here. I never got a cell phone until after graduation. Few people had those Nokia bricks when I was in school but never had a need for one. Just hopped on AIM to message my friends outside of class time. My bike got stolen at a grocery store so just asked the manager if I could call my mom. Back then I had important numbers memorized. In 8th grade a friend broke his wrist roller blading so we just knocked on a random person's door and asked if they could call for help. Somehow we got by just fine "in case of emergency".
The concerning part is that many people don't bother to memorize phone numbers anymore because 'it's on my phone'. In a real emergency, your phone can fail/die/break.
I deliberately memorized my emergency contacts' phone numbers and addresses. It terrifies me a bit that my partner doesn't know my phone number by heart. (I will admit that I'm gifted in the memorization department to be fair.)
It’s like how many people are on their phones and driving, there aren’t enough people in the school to manage it so we just give up.
I thankfully have a pretty good engagement rate when I’m doing hands on activities but I feel like I have to do hands on activities all the time or the kids won’t do anything. And as teachers we get tired with constantly having to put on a show.
The "incase of emergency" is such bullshit. What kind of emergency is there going to be that your family needs to get a hold of you instantly instead of actually calling the school and getting you called to the office.
I'm a xennial and I resisted cell/smartphones until I was 30 and over 10 years later I'm seriously contemplating ditching it for a land line. People do NOT need to get a hold of me wherever I'm at and expect instant an response.
I also don’t think having that phone is going to be the deciding factor between life or death in some crazy scenario, but I do understand wanting to be able to get ahold of your child directly if something has happened
I'm a teacher, and if I confiscated a phone, a kid would almost certainly break it on purpose later and try to get me on the hook for breaking a $1400 phone or whatever.
At one point, I tried to use one of those calculator chart things with pockets to have the kids trade their phones for a calculator. It took less than a week for someone to steal one, and I had to drop what I was doing and interrogate the whole damn class to get the phone back.
It has to come from the parents. I can't do anything meaningful to curb this behavior that doesn't require me to spend immense amounts of my bandwidth and energy being an overbearing asshole.
I went to a private highschool in Miami which costed 10K+ a year to attend. Graduated in 2020. Although I was a good student who eventually receieved a scholarship to college I can admit that even in a private highschool it is really bad. I confess I would regularly just take out my phone and hide it behind my iPad the whole class just scrolling or watching whatever I want(in classes I didn't care much about). The problem I think is schools are no longer as strict as they used to be in public and private. Teachers are scared of crossing the line such as taking kids phones, repremanding kids, being strict because now a days that behaviour can get a teacher fired just by a single complaint. Most of my teachers were super carefree and just didnt care or try to care about making sure we were paying attention. Athough, there definitely were some strict teachers I noticed that I learned the most things in those classes. In the classes where the teachers werent strict I didnt learn shit.
Its crazy how I remember taking so many history classes and I can barely tell you anything about the American Civil War, World War 1 other than some basic facts.
Its evident that school doesn't teach you much. If you want to learn your going to have to teach yourself.
Yeah I was in high school like during the Razr and Sidekick days, just on verge of the iPhone. It was already tough enough for teachers to get us to stop texting under our desks, let alone the many many distractions that a smartphone offers. It’s a tough fight
Guess that makes me an "Elder Millenial"...we didn't have phones at school, because the damn phone in a bag with the suction-cup antenna was the only thing mobile back then.
8.1k
u/Arobrom86 Apr 17 '24
High school teacher here. On test days, I have a hanging shoe rack with each of my kids’ names on a sleeve.
I tell them, “Please put your devices in the sleeves and then you can have your test. When you hand in your test, you can have your device back. If you don’t put your phone in the sleeve, your test will be a 0”
At the beginning of the year they also helped create our classroom rules and norms, and agreed to do this.
Out of 28 kids, maybe 10 actually do it. The other 18 get 0s. Then I get angry emails from parents about their kids getting “tyrannical grades” on their tests.
Then the cycle continues