Middle school removes bathroom mirrors to stop kids from making TikToks::Southern Alamance Middle School in Graham, North Carolina has taken drastic steps to reduce the time kids spend outside of class.
Yep this will stop them making tiktoks alright
The article is about them leaving class to go make tiktoks in the bathroom, and in the article the admin claims that it has lead to “Not as many visits to the bathroom, not staying as long” so it’s working, apparently. Nothing do with attempting to stop them outright from making videos.
Why not just ban smartphones in school? There’s ample research now that they’re harmful to teen mental health
deleted by creator
Add phone functionality to their guns?
Got you covered
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/rFtW419VwtY
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
For anyone that doesn’t know, Forgotten Weapons YouTube channel is one of the best channels relating to guns. But it’s a historical, educational persepective on guns, mostly guns from WW1,WWII, and anything up until the 1980s, though he does deal with some rare and some modern guns from time to time. Overall it’s a fantastic channel, the main guy Ian breaks down a guns history, mechanics, how it handled in production or war time, he really does his research, so it’s not your typical “I like muh guns big and loud” type of channel, it’s legit informative and educational, 100% check him out if you have the slightest interest in guns and gun history.
Flip phones.
You don’t. You die like everybody else, without saying goodbye.
They could just watch on the security cameras. I’m pretty sure they exist in every class and parents can access them at any time.
There aren’t security cameras in classrooms, at least in the schools I’ve worked. They are in the hallways though. I wasn’t allowed to record my class (despite that being good practice - watching yourself teach!)
I know a few schools in my area tried to institute zero tolerance no phones rule and the screaming from parents was loud enough that they gave up. One of the big sticking points was because of school shootings. Another was that schools have been bad about getting kids on the bus, that kids are getting lost or even ending up in bus depots at the end of the day.
I think a good middle ground might be to ban smartphones but not phones entirely. If you want your kid to be able to call you, buy them a nokia or something without internet capabilities
I mean the real reason is that parents are almost as bad as their kids with their phones. They have become accustomed to texting their children throughout the day.
Wow, that is eye opening. I can’t imagine how bad helicopter parents can be these days…
There are better tools these days than blanket prohibition.
The signals that voice and data go over are different from each other, so not all modern cellphone jammers jam the entire spectrum. Some can be set up to allow voice calls over the traditional channels while jamming data. This forces students to use the school’s wifi network for any Internet connectivity, whereupon their connectivity to apps and services can be whitelisted/blacklisted as deemed necessary by system admins.
Ergo, a system that keeps students off of their smartphones while allowing parental connectivity.
I proposed a Faraday cage once 😂. But running a jammer would be a good way to get the FCC involved (hint: massively illegal). And if you think dealing with the FCC is fun, ask your local ham operator…
Also they all know how to find proxies or unblocked sites. I watched severely intellectually disabled children teach other out to install VPNs. The smarter ones could install shit like Dolphin and would be playing Pokémon in class.
I feel that might be an issue from 4G onwards, considering VoLTE and VoNR are intended to avoid the use of a separate voice network to their existing data network
How do you only allow parent connectivity without allowing most everything else? Would this require schools to build an app specifically for them to allow through and make parents and kids use that? It sounds awful for everyone involved. A mildly determined and clever kid would probably be able to figure out how to circumvent the censorship anyways, and now you’re back at square one but with a bunch of useless infrastructure to maintain.
You’ll be so popular, with your dictator-like censorship of an organisation! How come no one even treats children like people, you wouldn’t find it acceptable to jam the mobile data of adults’ phones. Talk to the kids and encourage them to want to work at school, don’t be autocratic.
Because no one wants to deal with parents.
The children don’t count, clearly. Only adult opinions matter.
This but unironically. In my neck of the woods, we are hemorrhaging kids to private or charter. That means losing money. Superintendents and administrators view parents as customers. They don’t want a parent to get pissed and move districts because the dollars follow the students. If education is babysitting - if a teacher allows students to do nothing but watch videos on their phone - parents hear nothing and assume everything is fine. If a teacher is calling home about behavioral issues, or a school has “high” discipline rates, then that becomes a visible issue.
Good luck banning them from schools
I spent 12 years in American public school during which greater than 70% of the student body had cell or smart phones and 100% of them were successfully banned. If the phone is visible during the school day and you aren’t currently receiving a phone call from the President or from your parents on their way to the hospital, phone goes in the teacher’s desk. You get it back at the end of the day.
Its not that difficult at all.
What’s the difficulty? If they’re being used they’re out in the open, and if they’re out in the open they can be confiscated.
Good luck with that, the highschool I went to had a hard enough time getting students to stop vaping at school and during class, smartphones would be a much bigger battle. I graduated in 2019 and I still remember when they would try to crack down on cell phone use, never really affected me that much cause I only ever used my phone during class if I was done with everything but I still saw it go the same way every time. It would always only ever last for a month or two before the teachers just gave up because in the end if someone doesn’t wanna pay attention during class taking away their distraction isn’t gonna make them. They’ll just find some other distraction like talking to people or just zoning out. The problem is school just isn’t engaging and sure you can blame cell phones and social media for making it harder for people to pay attention to things that they don’t wanna do. But that doesn’t mean the solution is to not allow them during school, cause I’ve seen from experience that doesn’t help even if you manage to take away the phones, which already is really hard without impacting students who are following the rules negatively.
Man I remember being in school and a cellphone or pager was instant suspension.
deleted by creator
Is there research consensus on when children should be given phones? I would personally be very conservative about it, honestly.
I agree! There’s a campaign pushing to avoid giving kids phones until 8th grade, but I think even that seems a bit too young
Middle school removes mirrors so as to not distress vampires.
And why can’t we get blood on the lunch menu, huh?
L😂
Kids: press switch to front-facing camera button anyways
Most profile pictures I see suggest they don’t know this button even exists.
The front facing camera on iPhones is not great. Most kids have iPhones. I’m not willing to believe children who grew up with these phones don’t know their limitations.
The selfie camera, starting with iPhone 11 (both reg and pro) is 12MP, just like the main one. That’s plenty of good. Only the iPhone 15 line has 48MP main while retaining the 12MP selfie.
Not sure what you are smoking.
It’s probably my screen protector, now that I think about it.
I will say with confidence its’ low light performance is dogshit.
I am in agreement with your confident assessment.
Resolution is hardly the only thing that matters for picture quality. The two cameras are quite different in that aspect.
Yes, though the optics on the front facing camera are quite lacking in comparison. You’ll always get a better picture with the back cameras, but it’s just easier to use the front.
That said, I do just use the front facing camera.
Back in my day they removed mirrors so we wouldn’t summon Bloody Mary.
Bloody Mary.
Bloody Mary. 🫣
Bloody Mary.
It’s funny how this repeats every generation.
20 years back, my school removed mirrors in both the men’s and women’s washrooms, girls kept leaving lipstick on the mirrors, and the guys kept drawing on them with Sharpies.
They even removed toilet paper and hand towels because kids kept soaking it in water and throwing it up on the ceiling.
After that they even removed all the doors to the stalls in the men’s because kids kept leaving black marker “doodles” on them (ie. graffiti).
On my third year they ended up painting everything a very dark green colour. This included the walls, stalls and the ceiling to cover up all the black marker. The green made it almost impossible to make our any new graffiti added in black marker.
Was anyone else here brave enough to shit without a stall door? I had so much anxiety as a kid, but when u gotta go u gotta go.
Some kids tried to bully me and I was just like… I’m taking a shit, we all do it so fuck off. Still nerve wracking tho
Barrier free washrooms should be in pretty much every building/school. This is usually the most comfortable place to go number two.
The gym change room/locker room washrooms are usually more quite as well. They may still have their doors on in most cases.
Barrier free washrooms should not exist anywhere, for any reason. What the fuck are you on about. Have some sense of basic human rights and privacy, please.
If you want to go drop a turd on live TV, that’s on you, but under no circumstances are the rest of us to be subjected to that. Absolutely fucking not.
Or how about you give the kids extra space to let them practice their creativity?
Or how about those kids get back to class since they’re at school.
The school could provide a time and space for learning how to make better videos. It doesn’t have to be a fuck off and make tiktoks in lieu of going to curriculum classes. Make it something akin to a vocational class, even if an extra-curricular. Less a space for kids to fuck off during the day to make lame tiktoks and more of a means of teaching video production and the things that go into it. Photography, editing software, basic equipment operation, how to properly record audio, lighting, all of that type off thing.
This may sound ridiculously expensive, but I have seen schools have classes, and clubs, that do just this for just over two thousand dollars. This won’t stop kids from being disruptive with whatever bullshit is popular at the time, nothing will, but it can enrich those that do these things with actual interest in the craft.
I hope that works better for other schools than it did for mine.
Most of the students that went to the school that I went to opted for a “spare” class instead of taking photography, business, arts, programming, or any of the other creative courses. The tools were there in my case, but most people just ignored them in favour of being able to leave school early, or in favour of taking an extra long lunch. They ignored the after school stuff too, because they wanted to spend time with their friends somewhere else.
We had a pretty good photography course too, they covered almost everything and there was even an option to take it for multiple years/grades if you wanted to learn even more about it. The kids at my school who usually did things like Tik Tok and Vine in the bathroom didn’t seem to really care for those courses. Social media was just fun for them, they never intended on making anything of it.
There has to be some solution that we aren’t seeing yet. There has to be some common ground between “let the kids do whatever they want, regardless of their education” and “dystopian hell”.
It would also help if kid’s parents were more involved overall, although you could also argue that a huge part of the cause is the insane hours that many of the parents have to spend working to let the family survive.
This all sucks. I hope someone is able to make your idea work, truly. We need a solution, asap.
GOP’s master plot of defunding public schools is years in the making in NC. Teacher pay, at least before I left, was one of the worst in the nation. As a result, this is sadly on point for the area.
Someone is always going to be the worst in the nation.
Holy christ yes. This post is stupid, everything about the situation is stupid but how the hell do you get from ‘some random ass school took down the mirrors because of tik tok’ too ‘GOP EVIL1!!1!!11’
Believe me…I get that the GOP is evil but holy fuck do people stretch to get to that subject here.
They do. It’s called art class.
So many people always seem determined to completely suck the joy out of schools, like it’s the 1950s again. Everything is so strict and anti-fun.
TikTok and social media in general are popular amongst kids today. That’s just how it is. I think schools should try to embrace youth trends and find creative ways to incorporate them into the learning environment.
