Let me preface this by saying I don’t (really) have a problem with the no-phones restrictions. I do think that it’s pretty crucial to have access to your phone in case of an actual emergency but, realistically, those are few and far between. Phone use during class time, etc., was a little out of hand, especially in the non-AP/non-honors classes.
What really annoys me about the policy is two things:
1. The Chromebook Experience
The new policy applies to “all internet-enabled personal electronic devices,” including laptops. This means that I cannot take my personal laptop to school, and I am forced to use my school Chromebook.
I hope it goes without saying that I cannot code1 on a piece-of-shit Intel Celeron N4500 from 2021 and a complete lack of RAM2. The computer is such a piece of shit that I cannot run VSCode in a web browser, remoting into my home computer, without the computer freezing up every five seconds. And here I thought Google was supposed to be halfway decent at coding.
Also annoying: I cannot access my beautiful Angad Drive (which contains all of my college application information, by the way), my personal email, literally the MIT application portal, any of it. The laptops’ filtering are done on a whitelist: We’re basically only allowed to access Google Drive and Google Classroom. And maybe Common App, if I’m feeling lucky.
2. I’m not a brainrotted child
Our schools are treating everyone like small, brainrotted iPad kids. I’m (nearly) a grown-ass adult. Some of my friends are already 18! We do not need to be babied around like this, and it’s frankly disrespectful that we are.
I did say before that phone use was getting out of hand, but that’s only because for every infraction, teachers interrupt their entire lesson to tell that one kid to their phone away. In stark contrast, we have college professors, who will teach their lecture regardless of whether some students are on their phones.
3. A Solution?
I’m not arguing that a good high school education is not essential for students, it is. I also agree that the use of phones during that instructional period detriment students’ learning.
But you see, we already have a system to deal with students who don’t pay attention in class—it’s called grades. Basically, when a kid does bad in school3, hold them back a grade until they pass their classes. I know, mindblowing.
Footnotes
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I actually do need to code during the day, especially when robotics season starts. ↩
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The documentation says it was 8GB of RAM but mentioning that, at least in the main body, is rhetorically ineffective because it sounds not bad but it does not do justice to how slow the piece of shit runs. Thanks, AP Lang. ↩
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Proving they don’t actually understand the material that they should ↩