[bryanrasmussen]

>whiny parents who rage when their children are told they can't be playing video games in class

you have stats on that? It seems like an outlier.

>teachers who are using computer programs to teach the kids instead of actually teaching.

before laptops there were bad teachers who used books to teach the kids instead of actually teaching - as in: "read chapter 7, there will be a test!"

if after laptops there is a worse result then it seems to argue that laptops in the hands of bad teachers are worse than books in the hands of bad teachers, at least.

[bubblewand]

> you have stats on that? It seems like an outlier

No stats, but it’s extremely real.

I know lots of teachers. Parents who flip shit if their kids can’t answer their texts while in class are common. Parents who call their kids in class just to chat are less common, but not as one-in-a-million as you’d think.

The attitude you (I’m assuming) and I were raised with, when it comes to school, is less universal than you perhaps believed. And I mean among adults.

[eudamoniac]

I've never understood something about this phenomenon: why does the school care if the parent flips a shit? What power does the parent actually have in a public school? I always thought it would make more sense for the principal/teacher to give the parent the middle finger in this scenario, but is there some reason I'm unaware of for why that is not realistic?

[bubblewand]

A parent with a certain temperament, which seems to overlap substantially with the sort with stupid expectations and demands, and a lot of time on their hands (which, ditto) can be extremely annoying, raise hell with the media, get the school board involved (some school boards have members who are these kinds of parents, haha) and everybody’s just too busy with actual work to deal with that shit. Enough of it, and they give in just to get them off their backs.

This is why state-level phone bans are so nice, as it keeps these sorts from focusing on school districts, where like five parents can be cause a lot of trouble, and shifts them to focusing on the state level, where a few hundred or a thousand scattered parents with stupid ideas can more easily be ignored and the bar for causing real irritation is a lot higher in terms of time and cost (want to go bother the state legislature, and they’re ignoring your calls? Get ready to travel…)

One super-power of private schools is that they can just tell parents with incompatible ideas of how the school should run to fuck off (and they in-fact do this). Public schools have to deal with them as long as they’re willing to keep poking, which can amount to a surprisingly long time.

[bryanrasmussen]

OK so in fact parents who want their kids to be able to communicate with them as needed, not parents who want their kids to be able to play video games when so desiring?

Of course the ability to do the first gives the ability to do the second, but I think we can agree that they don't as a general rule want their kids to play video games. Again, outliers always exist.

Now as to why parents want their kids to answer when texted that can vary, maybe a lot of reasons are stupid but I can easily construct familial situations where the kid not being able to answer a text is a major disaster and probably parents in that situation flip shit because stuff is way more difficult for them than it is for other people. Probably those parents should have notified the school though, and the school should allow exceptions, but lots of schools are not, in my experience, run by people able to see the need for exceptions.

So I sort of expect that flipping shit happens the more stress there is, some of that can be passive aggressive shit flipping to relieve stress from other places but I would expect, as it matches to my experience in the world, that when shit flipping over trivial stupid stuff happens it is probably because the relatively trivial situation that is being flipped over connects closely to some problematic situation, and thus the trivial situation for most people who flip shit over it is not as trivial as it might be for the general population.

In short I would expect that the tendency to flip shit over the kid not being able to answer calls or texts in class would be proportionate to how absolutely necessary it is for particular family to have the kid answer calls or texts.

[vjvjvjvjghv]

“ familial situations where the kid not being able to answer a text is a major disaster ”

I am having serious trouble coming up with a situation where it’s absolutely necessary for a kid to answer a text during class and not during a break or be notified by the principal office.

[bubblewand]

This behavior is present in plenty of families that don’t have the kinds of pressure on them that you’re describing. It’s not really connected to that (and needing to reach your kid instantly at 11:00AM on a Tuesday isn’t that common a thing to fall out of families being under most sorts of pressure)

I’m telling you, lots of parents just have very different attitudes toward school than one might expect (than I expected, certainly!). The phone stuff is just one manifestation of this.

[vjvjvjvjghv]

">whiny parents who rage when their children are told they can't be playing video games in class you have stats on that? It seems like an outlier."

I know several teachers who retired because over the last decades student discipline has declined and teachers don't get support from either parents or principals. Basically teachers have no tools for discipling students while on the other hand parents demand all kinds of things from teachers but demand nothing from their kids. And principals almost always side with the parents against the teacher. It seems teaching has become an impossible task.

[BLKNSLVR]

This equates to the experience of the various teachers in my social orbit.

[freeopinion]

I think it might be more insightful to say "laptops in the hands of students are worse than books in the hands of bad teachers".

A bad teacher can say "read chapter 7, there will be a test!" and the student can ignore the book, or vandalize the book or whatever. But when the student has a computer with an internet connection, they can vandalize the computer, ignore the website, or jump on an unrelated website.

I'm tempted to think that the laptop makes the situation worse. Some student who might have read part of the chapter out of pure boredom during classtime is now driven by dopamine to jump on the distraction.

[lr4444lr]

Stats? Who do you think is buying the kids the phones and the data plans? Who is letting them take them to school in the first place?

The kids would be better off being told to read chapter 7 than play sensory overload edutainment tools that fragment their attention.

[bryanrasmussen]

gee, it seems like you are somehow in agreement with my point that probably laptops are worse than books, but also angry at me for some reason.

[jimmydddd]

"--Whiny parents" is definitely a major thing and not an outlier. For an older guy like me, I was shocked by the stories I've heard recently. ---Coworker's son is acting out in class and not following any instructions. He calls the school and says the teacher is not challenging the son enough and is son is super special. ---Friend retired and took a job as an elementary school classroom aide. When she instructs a fourth grader to go to class, he punches her in the stomach several times. School administration tells her to keep quiet about it as they don't want to anger the parents. ---Parent of third grader informs school that her daughter should be allowed to dress and act like a lion and roam around the classroom.

[seanmcdirmid]

> ---Parent of third grader informs school that her daughter should be allowed to dress and act like a lion and roam around the classroom.

This specific meme has been floating around with the MAGA crowd for at least 4-5 years now. It’s not clear if it has any basis in reality, but it is one of those “I heard it on Facebook so it must be true” kind of things.

[heisenbit]

That is a meme and it does not matter whether it happened or not it would be too rare to matter.

What matters is the lack of discipline and respect for boundaries (beyond traditional teen behavior) possibly caused by social deprivation in our social app age. It is brought to the surface in the classroom where teachers have considerable less power than earlier. Physical attack once unthinkable are not rare anymore.

[vjvjvjvjghv]

Kids punching teachers without consequences is real though. Or it may even have negative consequences for the teacher who got punched.

[lelanthran]

> before laptops there were bad teachers who used books to teach the kids instead of actually teaching - as in: "read chapter 7, there will be a test!"

Yeah, but when a kid opens a textbook there aren't a bunch of distractions designed by professional scientists to manipulate the user into more engagement.

That, alone, is enough for me to wish that study devices (laptops, tablets, whatever) were locked down with only a few whitelisted sites for material and research.

And even then, that may not be enough. I rarely go to wikipedia (or tvtropes) anymore because what happens is I look something up, then 3 hours of fascinated clicks later, I realise I just burned my whole evening!

[bryanrasmussen]

are you agreeing with me that laptops are probably worse than the books? Because it seems like your post are is rhetorically structured as a disagreement while reifying my main point. Which is somewhat weird.

[lelanthran]

> are you agreeing with me that laptops are probably worse than the books? Because it seems like your post are is rhetorically structured as a disagreement while reifying my main point. Which is somewhat weird.

Let me clarify - laptops/phones/tablets are objectively worse than books, because the intended design is to drive engagement, and not (as with books) to present learning material!

The fact that there may be a good teacher, a bad teacher, or no teacher at all is, frankly, irrelevant.

[telman17]

No, thus why I said it could be boiled down to.

However as I say in another comment, most of my family are educators so these experiences represent what they've been dealing with for the past 20+ years.

> before laptops there were bad teachers who used books to teach the kids instead of actually teaching - as in: "read chapter 7, there will be a test!"

I think both could be true and I'm not excluding either. The issues I've heard almost always come down to entitled parents who don't want to raise their own kids but have the schools do it for them, then complain when their kid brings home a disciplinary document for not being able to follow simple conduct rules in class.

[beepbooptheory]

20+ years feels like a very long time for this to be the norm. Smartphone hegemony in general isn't that old.

[TimorousBestie]

Close to twenty years. First iPhone was 2007, I got my first one in 2012 or so.

Before smartphones, texting during class was very common when I was in high school. That’s more or less how I learned that 9/11 happened.

[mlrtime]

My wife is a teacher and I know several. All of the ones that have quiet have cited the worst part about teaching isn't the money or "bad" students. It's either the parents unrealistic demands or just dealing with them, or the same with the administration.

Teaching, kids or pay [although more is always better] was never the issue.

[vjvjvjvjghv]

I hear the same from teachers I know. Pay could be better, some kids suck, but the real issue is parents and administration who do nothing to support the teacher.

[linkregister]

All it takes is one persistent parent who manages to get an administrator to reprimand a teacher for enforcing classroom rules. A teacher who deeply cares about teaching will need to support themselves at the end of the day.

[freeopinion]

This does not require a persistent parent. Administrators whose job it is to administer consequences for misbehavior already reprimand teachers for enforcing school rules. The turnover on new teachers is crazy bad. It's kind of like what you hear about Russia "recruiting" foreigners to die in Ukraine. Our school district recruits teachers from places like the Philippines and Singapore. Even with the promise of fat American wages and a ticket to the promised land, a huge number of even those teachers don't last two years.