It's weird to me that cell phones in the classroom is even controversial. When I was in school, some kids had Walkmans, CD players, and game boys. You could bring them to school but they weren't allowed in the classroom without prior approval. In class, you were expected to pay attention to the teacher, even if you didn't want to. If you got caught with a device instead of listening, the teacher simply took it away until after class. If you kept bringing it in, you'd lose it until the end of the week, semester, or school year.

This doesn't seem to be a thing anymore, and there probably multiple sad reasons why.

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yepitwas 5 days ago | parent [-]

To be very blunt: trashy parents with too much time on their hands will become enraged and raise a huge stink if their kid can't text them or answer their calls(!) while in class. So many will do this that schools just gave up.

That's why it's nice when states just make it a law. That shuts those people up (or at least forces them to go complain somewhere else, where they're more easily ignored and it takes more effort so they'll probably just give up).

(That's the middle-class schools—in really rough schools, teachers have to pick their battles because actual violence is on the table as a response, even among lower elementary kids, and admin's too busy dealing with things way more serious than some kid texting in class to back teachers up on small stuff like that)

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ryandrake 5 days ago | parent [-]

I think as a general societal change, we need to stop catering to people simply because they "become enraged."

	▲	yepitwas 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		To be fair, there’s also a set who think their kid needs a phone on them at all times so they can make a call if there’s a school shooting. This doesn’t make any statistical sense as a justification (it might if more “school shootings” were indiscriminate mass shootings, but only a very tiny fraction are—not to downplay them, at all, but there are a couple statistical sieves here filtering for “a personal cell phone a student had saved a life” and the very first one is already filtering it down to almost nothing) but it’s a little easier to sympathize with the basic impulse, at least.