/tech/ - Technology

I HATE PHONES

Teachers getting pepper sprayed over phones is not shocking to me. On my first day teaching, I had a girl leave my class and scream at me for asking her to put her phones away. I caught the same girl scrolling tiktok on a serious standardized test. I’ve found a kid using chat GPT on his final essay— it’s blocked on the computers but he emails it to himself from his phone, doesn’t even get rid of the "Sure! Here’s a paragraph…." part of the bot’s response when he pastes it into his essay.

I’ve seen kids taking videos of horrible fights, and I’ve seen kids watching those videos later. It seems both exciting and numbing to them. Sometimes they’re texting when I’m talking, and they say they’re talking to their parents. Why are you texting your kid? Stop.

I had one kid lose his phone when he came back from a suspension after posting threats, but he was still on his phone in my class because he handed the administrators his old phone instead of his real one.

Sometimes you suggest to administrators that none of them should be allowed to have phones, and they say it’s a safety issue. You lock away a basket of phones into a closet down the hall during a standardized test because they won’t stop beeping, and your department chair tells you that you could get in trouble for unwarranted seizure.

You do your duty and tell parents their kids are on their phones, and they tell you they thought their ADHD kid was allowed to have a phone in their educational plan. If you say they aren’t, and read to them their plan, then they demand that their child get ten minute cool-down breaks— where they go in the hall and look at their phones. It goes into the plan.

The accommodation I need is for you to read, listen, talk, and write without looking at your phone. These kids use their phones to cheat, to torture each other, to shop, and to essentially spoil their youth and their last chance for a free education. If anyone tells you this isn’t prolific in American schools, they are lying to you or they have the type of brain worms where they think digital technology is helping people and not wrecking our brains. If you’re in your 30s+, you are basically from the Before Times, and you’re probably ontologically different from younger generations because of smartphone exposure.

I want to throw my phone down the well. I don’t like how accessible I have become to other people in all the things I do. I don’t want to answer any more questions. I don’t want to be known. I think I want to go back to letters. We date on the internet, fuck on the internet, die on the internet. It’s hollow & it just makes me feel hollow.

In my farming community, last night all the neighbors had bonfires during the full moon. I sat with a bug scientist who found the first swarm of killer bees in our state. They killed a goat in a factory town. There was a pack of howling coyotes in the mountains very close by, under the planet Jupiter. This younger generation is going to miss out on the natural world, on learning, and on listening to stories. They’re not going to experience the fires, they’re going to watch the fires on the screen.