Teachers have lost much authority in the school system, making it difficult to enforce cell phone rules. If a parent wants their child to have their phone and use it to take calls and texts, then often, the administration sides with the parents. It makes some teachers feel helpless to solve this problem.
I hear they're suing. Why do you call them "phones" Phones send and receive calls and text messages. These are mobile devices with access to the internet, they are not "phones".
I'm glad to see that more people are waking up to the fact that the majority of students spend the majority of their school time (whether in the classroom or at lunch) playing with their phones. Whatever the "new policy" is, it will always translate into this: it is up to the teacher to enforce it. What this means in practice is that the teacher, sooner or later, will give up. Why? Because a teacher can't spend a huge chunk of time EVERY SINGLE DAY walking up to a student and confirming that they are, as they claim, doing "educational things" on their phone -- wink, wink. And what happens when "the cool, young teacher down the hall" let's kids play with their phones whenever they want to, and enrollment in the "cool" courses goes up, and it goes down in Mr. FuddyDuddy's courses? No teacher wants the short end of that stick. It's all about enrolment for them. It's laughable. It's especially laughable when you realize that school Boards have almost completely done away with suspensions since 2020. Why? Because suspensions were non-uniformly distributed across the different racial groups, which is always and immediately interpreted as proof of racism. So, how well do you think this "new policy" is going to go if it "disproportionally affects communities of colour"? Who has the stomach for those racially-charged conversations? The teacher has everything to lose and nothing to gain. Bad news: Canada (and the US) won't actually take the cell phone problem seriously until we in the West experience another wake-up call, like we did in 1957 with Sputnik. Sputnik snapped us out of our lazy complacency and necessitated a rapid modernization of science education, among other things. Maybe China will surprise us with a new Sputnik-y leap forward, and then we'll just have to hope it's not too late to play catch-up. Until then, it will be business as usual, which means a continuous decline (sometimes quick, sometimes slow) in education (for which cell phones are only partly responsible). Final point: It would be nice to compare students' abilities year over year, but I'm afraid the deck is stacked to make that impossible. EQAO might seem like it's a decent metric, but those on the inside know that it changes year to year (in content and in delivery), so it's not nearly as "standardized" as one would hope. (Schools even play games regarding which kids write it and which kids don't, which skews things wildly.) Maybe one day the unions won't fight any and all attempts at standardized testing, but until then we have pretty much nothing to go on... except for the painfully vivid observations of recently retired teachers. And why would anyone care about things that a lifetime educator has to say about what goes on in the classrooms of Ontario?
Teachers have lost much authority in the school system, making it difficult to enforce cell phone rules. If a parent wants their child to have their phone and use it to take calls and texts, then often, the administration sides with the parents. It makes some teachers feel helpless to solve this problem.
I hear they're suing.
Why do you call them "phones"
Phones send and receive calls and text messages.
These are mobile devices with access to the internet, they are not "phones".
I'm glad to see that more people are waking up to the fact that the majority of students spend the majority of their school time (whether in the classroom or at lunch) playing with their phones.
Whatever the "new policy" is, it will always translate into this: it is up to the teacher to enforce it. What this means in practice is that the teacher, sooner or later, will give up. Why? Because a teacher can't spend a huge chunk of time EVERY SINGLE DAY walking up to a student and confirming that they are, as they claim, doing "educational things" on their phone -- wink, wink. And what happens when "the cool, young teacher down the hall" let's kids play with their phones whenever they want to, and enrollment in the "cool" courses goes up, and it goes down in Mr. FuddyDuddy's courses? No teacher wants the short end of that stick. It's all about enrolment for them.
It's laughable. It's especially laughable when you realize that school Boards have almost completely done away with suspensions since 2020. Why? Because suspensions were non-uniformly distributed across the different racial groups, which is always and immediately interpreted as proof of racism. So, how well do you think this "new policy" is going to go if it "disproportionally affects communities of colour"? Who has the stomach for those racially-charged conversations? The teacher has everything to lose and nothing to gain.
Bad news:
Canada (and the US) won't actually take the cell phone problem seriously until we in the West experience another wake-up call, like we did in 1957 with Sputnik. Sputnik snapped us out of our lazy complacency and necessitated a rapid modernization of science education, among other things. Maybe China will surprise us with a new Sputnik-y leap forward, and then we'll just have to hope it's not too late to play catch-up.
Until then, it will be business as usual, which means a continuous decline (sometimes quick, sometimes slow) in education (for which cell phones are only partly responsible).
Final point:
It would be nice to compare students' abilities year over year, but I'm afraid the deck is stacked to make that impossible. EQAO might seem like it's a decent metric, but those on the inside know that it changes year to year (in content and in delivery), so it's not nearly as "standardized" as one would hope. (Schools even play games regarding which kids write it and which kids don't, which skews things wildly.) Maybe one day the unions won't fight any and all attempts at standardized testing, but until then we have pretty much nothing to go on... except for the painfully vivid observations of recently retired teachers. And why would anyone care about things that a lifetime educator has to say about what goes on in the classrooms of Ontario?