Parental Permission For Mobile Phones In Schools
from the this-helps-how? dept
While plenty of schools are looking at banning all mobile phones just because a few kids misuse them, students at some public schools in Australia will be allowed to bring in phones... but only with a parent's explicit approval. That's right, if you want to bring your phone to school, you first have to get your parent to sign a paper saying it's okay. The schools claim they're doing this to cut down on text message bullying -- though, it's hard to see how this helps very much. You have to figure that students will get good at convincing their parents to sign the slip "for safety reasons" (of course). Otherwise, the worst of the bullies are likely to either forget the note or just keep bringing the phone to school anyway.
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Make cell phones harder for short index fingers
For every 600 liveborn children, 279 embryos or fetuses are miscarried, 176 of them after a positive pregnancy test, and 103 of them prior to being able to detect that a woman is pregnant. (William's Obstetrics)
How many non-siblings do you have, that your parents never knew existed?
Following up on earlier research about lesbians having long ring fingers (http://www.unl.edu/rhames/courses/readings/homofinger/homo_finger.html), now a team from Alberta University has discovered that men with shorter index fingers tend to be more violent.
http://www.asahi.com/science/update/0307/002.html
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What the heck is "text message bullying"?
If students aren't permitted to have phones in school, how is the "bully" supposed to text nastygrams to the victim?
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Re: What the heck is
If you give your kids superhuman abilities, they'll never be bullied.
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Re: What the heck is
Well, a suitably nasty brat will just bring in the phone regardless, as Mike points out.
However, the point of the policy (and law in general) is not to render it impossible to do this, but rather to lay down the lines whereby you can say `this action overstepped the lines' - when someone's caught you have a ground on which to accuse them.
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Mike, get some faqs
Mike,
How many high school teachers have you talked to lately about cell phones? How many who work in "schools in need of improvement" where the population has difficulty dealing with school?
at least 4 times today (different kids and classes) a cell phone went off interrupting the teacher's lesson. (which happened to be on collaging pics of Berners-Lee and the Cernettes in OSX MS word)
With the NYC school cell phone ban, the teacher can make a credible warning that the next phone to go off would be confiscated.
Without the ban, there's either much less that can be done, or it would involve a tougher than needed punishment, and a lot more paperwork.
Perhaps we also need to look for technological measures to combat a "technological" problem, such as using our school's autodialer (school messenger) to launch a DOS attack during school hours against student's cell phones.
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the point
The point is that when permission is granted, the mobile phone will be listed on school records. Then, if someone receives an abusive message, staff can look up who it came from.
Not saying it will work well, but that fact was missing from the original post.
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