If the school has landlines, it doesn't effect your cell-phone at all.
You sort of missed my point. If I'm in the car at the curb, waiting for my kid, then using jamming means I am unreachable by phone - meaning I have to find a parking spot, go inside, get the office to track down my kid, etc., which disrupts the work of several office workers as well as the class (when the student is pulled out). It would be much less disruptive if we could just use our phones - I text my kid, who quietly ducks out of the room (having told the teacher before class that she'd be leaving).
At work you should be doing your job, personal business can wait until your on your own time.
If we were talking about hourly workers, sure, you might have a point. But we're not. We're talking about about salaried teachers who generally work far more hours than their contracts specify. We already underpay them - are we really going to ban them from using their two minutes of spare time between classes to make a quick personal call? Yeah, that'll go a long way towards showing them that we respect them.
A salaried employee should be allowed to make personal calls whenever he or she desires, as long as that employee's work is getting done. I'm not saying they should make calls during class time.
Sometimes learning shouldn't be interesting. The whole idea of education being entertaining is rather new, and hasn't really shown any positive results.
I said "interest", not "entertain". I'm not saying we should turn school into playtime. Your mistaken assumption sort of makes the rest of your comments irrelevant.
If a kid isn't interested, the kid is not going to pay attention - period. This is true outside of school as much as it's true during school. I didn't practice piano because I didn't care, not because it wasn't entertaining. Conversely, I did my math homework because it was interesting, not because I found it amusing (it wasn't).
Providing kids with a challenge is often enough to interest them. That's precisely the problem with the "No Child Left Behind" stuff - it forces classes to progress at the speed of the slowest-learning student. That's just begging for everyone smarter than average to be bored out of their mind - kids need to be engaged, or they'll find something to engage themselves.
This is why I skimmed through high school and never learned to put effort into homework - I wasn't ever given an honest challenge. If I can skim-read the book and BS an essay that earns a B+, why would I carefully read the book and thoughtfully write an essay? There was not much difference between a B+ and an A- or A, especially where the cost of getting the last two grade jumps is a drastic increase in time and effort.
No, I don't have ADD or anything of the sort. I just needed a challenge, and I didn't get it until college, by which time it was almost too late to learn the homework-doing skills I needed.
It's been a while since high school for you, hasn't it? Most students would't know a wireless network from a hair net, even if they had a cell phone capable of accessing one.
Even if they know what wireless is, it's doubtful that a significant number of them know how to crack a WEP key from their phone.
No... my wife's a stay-at-home mom, and I'm a programmer. I can take (or make) as many personal calls as I want to. But I don't, because that's what IM is for;)
Anyway, no active jammer is going to jam just inside the walls, it's going to have a range that extends outside the walls of the school, and probably significantly so.
If they're being forced to walk halfway across the soccer field to make a call, you may as well call it "off the property".
There is a difference between someone who knows how to do something by hand, yet uses a calculator to save time, and someone who uses the calculator to get "mysterious results."
While I understand your point, I think you answered it yourself:
when critical thinking comes into play (real life word problems!) then all your calculators and internets training would be gone to waste.
Which is exactly what we should be focusing on. If a student wants to use a calculator to do the boring integration or derivative calculation, we should let them, because our curriculum should be focusing on real-world problems, not on artificial problems.
In other words, we should be grading based on those real-world problems at least as much as we grade on the "what's d/dx of x^2 + x + 3" type of problem.
If a student doesn't know how to do those real-world problems, they're not going to know how whether or not they've done the calculus by hand or on the calculator.
Physics, for example, is not so much about knowing how to do the math as it is about knowing what equation to apply. Whether or not I use a calculator to get the numeric answer is irrelevant to whether I know which equation to use, and the curriculum should be designed to match.
In my opinion, if banning calculators during a math course makes people get better grades, we're designing the course wrong, because in the real world, you'd better be using a calculator - at least to verify your results, if nothing else!
I'm going to assume there are exceptions for dangerous items in your argument.
That would be a valid assumption.
You can remove the object that is distracting the student, or you can remove the student. Which is in the better interests of the student (and of the classroom)?
Remove the student, if you have to remove anything. A student reading a fantasy book is likely not distracting other students, unless they're mesmerized by the cover art, or if turning the pages is exceptionally noisy.
In any case, if the student is reading instead of paying attention, then the student is obviously not interested; kick them out into the hall and let them keep reading.
A teacher shouldn't be required to walk off the property just to make a quick personal call, especially since a teacher's "break" is usually just a few minutes and they have other things to do as well.
That's fine, sometimes, but it's not practical for my wife while she's breastfeeding the baby, and it doesn't help us receive calls any better (which is what I'm more concerned with than anything).
In the last month or so I've gotten voicemail notifications without a "missed call" notification several times, despite my phone being on the whole time right next to the window.
Exactly. I think the solution is to engage the students more in the learning process, rather than tying them to a chair with their eyes taped open...
Kids are looking for entertainment. The best teachers I ever had were the ones who made it fun to learn the material. If you're having fun, why would you interrupt that to pull out your phone?
You know, it just occurred to me that this is probably the exact reason there are so many people who don't know how to google for answers. They're taught to pull out a giant textbook, leaf to the currently scheduled chapter, and skim the headings for the answer they need, instead of being taught how anyone in the modern real world would search for answers (Google or somesuch).
I disagree with allowing teachers to confiscate property from students. There are other solutions, I think.
For example, teachers should dock points from a student's grade. This could, of course, lead to the same thing as what "going set" in Pinochle led to with my uncle - he went set so many times that he would bid up ridiculously high knowing he couldn't win anyway. This led to a new house rule - if you go set twice, you can't bid anymore.
*Ahem*. That is, a student might lose so many points that he has no hope of recovering his grade, and would therefore not care about disrupting class more, but I'm sure a sufficiently crafty teacher could come up with a solution. (A bucket into which you could deposit your phone at the beginning of class, in silent mode, in exchange for recovering lost points, perhaps?)
I'm sure there are a dozen things wrong with this particular solution. It's just an idea.
In any case, I'm very uncomfortable with allowing teachers to confiscate a student's personal property.
This is exactly what always bugged me about school. I can imagine this conversation with a professor:
Me: "What? I can't use a calculator to do my physics test?" Prof: "You have to prove you can solve it!" Me: "Doesn't knowing how to use the calculator to solve it prove I can solve it?" Prof: "No, you'd just write a program to solve it for you." Me: "If I were doing this in the real world, wouldn't I be using a calculator?" Prof: "... Just do as I say."
I mean really. If you're a physicist, and you're doing complex calculations by hand, wouldn't you be better off if you had a calculator there to do the hard part for you?
Isn't knowing how to make a calculator give you the answer just as good as knowing how to get it by hand (speaking in terms of real-world application)?
They don't have a bias against techs, per se, they're just not willing to pay enough to hire competent ones... or even incompetent ones.
Which reminds me. One year my junior high school decided that rather than, say, buying new text books, or updating the computer lab, they would upgrade the A/C units in the office.
They've got their priorities straight... *sigh*
But even beyond that, they're unwilling to hire enough teachers. Utah law specifies a maximum class size X, so when my little brother got to Kindergarten and the class size was X+15, my mom got angry and forced them to get another Kindergarten teacher.
Guess what they did? They moved a third-grade teacher to Kindergarten.
Three years later, same situation. They just moved the teacher back.
Nobody cared that they were both breaking the law and ruining these kids' education (by not giving them enough one-on-one attention, which was the intent of the max class size law). They only did anything about it because someone yelled at them until they couldn't ignore it anymore - and even then, they just hid the problem, rather than fix it.
There are a lot bigger problems in our schools than cell phones... cell phone use is a symptom, not a disease, and it indicates that students are bored. (If they were interested, they'd be paying attention, right?) Perhaps we could focus on that?
It should be illegal for a teacher to confiscate property from a student. Just because a student is on school property doesn't mean they have no rights regarding search and seizure of personal property. (I'm not sure what the courts have ruled on this, I'm sure they've said something.)
Back in high school, a friend of mine was reading a fantasy novel (Wheel of Time, I think) during class, for whatever reason. (Boredom, probably.) The teacher told him to give her the book, and he'd get it back after class. Instead, he sat on it and said "go ahead and take it."
No teacher who values their job would ever do that - sexual harassment lawsuits could quickly follow. My friend wouldn't have done it, but he knew she wouldn't risk it.
Whether or not my friend was right to disobey the teacher, he was right in one thing - the book was his property, and she had no right to take it from him.
The law requires kids to be in school, but it doesn't require them to pay attention. That has its own consequences.
I don't have a landline at home - the only way to reach me is via my cell phone (well, I have an office phone, but I don't give out that number). That means if I were to go pick up my kid from school - assuming we've communicated beforehand where to meet, since my kid couldn't just call me due to the jamming - I'd be unreachable.
There may be teachers that only have a cell phone, like me. Are we really going to prevent them from having access to their only means of personal communication, just so a few kids don't use phones during class?
There are better ways to encourage kids to keep their phones put away. We've all heard the stories of college professors offering to skip a test if no cell phones ring during any lecture.
Or, you know, we could make learning interesting again. This "no child left behind" crap is the biggest offender there, IMO, and it's causing more problems than it's helping. (But then, I'm not an educator, and I don't have school-age kids yet, so I may be wrong.)
Why doesn't anyone realize that they'd be banning teachers from using cell phones as well? I know not all teachers use cell phones, but a lot do, and I doubt they'd be amused that they're suddenly unable to use a cell phone during the portion of the day when the cell phone is most useful (i.e. when they're not at home).
If you're passing substrings around, you most likely know the size anyway, and if you're doing read-only stuff you don't want the overhead of a string copy.
you can safely operate on a string when you don't have its beginning.
This is a serious benefit for certain applications - a Pascal-style string would require you to copy substrings in order to use them (so it could maintain the length), whereas a C-style string lets you use an arbitrary pointer.
A C program that processes text files (e.g. logfiles) into some other format (e.g. csv files) would probably run much faster in C than in Pascal, if the C program is allowed to take advantage of the aforementioned benefit.
No, they just feel like it. Most of them don't even bother to do any more verification than "make sure you can receive e-mails at ssladmin@domainyouwantacertfor.com".... and that's automated.
In other words, SSL certs are infinite in supply and virtually zero-cost to create, so they're milking them for all they're (apparently) worth.
They don't? They have, and can, at least to some extent. I'm sure you remember the Sony rootkit fiasco.
Just wait. Soon here they'll be distributing CDs that contain no audio tracks, just some encrypted software that connects to some remote server and streams you the audio. You want to use a stereo? You'll need one of our patented internet-connected stereo input devices - just five easy payments of $29.95! Oh, and that stops working after a year, too.
Slashdot Mirror
If the school has landlines, it doesn't effect your cell-phone at all.
You sort of missed my point. If I'm in the car at the curb, waiting for my kid, then using jamming means I am unreachable by phone - meaning I have to find a parking spot, go inside, get the office to track down my kid, etc., which disrupts the work of several office workers as well as the class (when the student is pulled out). It would be much less disruptive if we could just use our phones - I text my kid, who quietly ducks out of the room (having told the teacher before class that she'd be leaving).
At work you should be doing your job, personal business can wait until your on your own time.
If we were talking about hourly workers, sure, you might have a point. But we're not. We're talking about about salaried teachers who generally work far more hours than their contracts specify. We already underpay them - are we really going to ban them from using their two minutes of spare time between classes to make a quick personal call? Yeah, that'll go a long way towards showing them that we respect them.
A salaried employee should be allowed to make personal calls whenever he or she desires, as long as that employee's work is getting done. I'm not saying they should make calls during class time.
Sometimes learning shouldn't be interesting. The whole idea of education being entertaining is rather new, and hasn't really shown any positive results.
I said "interest", not "entertain". I'm not saying we should turn school into playtime. Your mistaken assumption sort of makes the rest of your comments irrelevant.
If a kid isn't interested, the kid is not going to pay attention - period. This is true outside of school as much as it's true during school. I didn't practice piano because I didn't care, not because it wasn't entertaining. Conversely, I did my math homework because it was interesting, not because I found it amusing (it wasn't).
Providing kids with a challenge is often enough to interest them. That's precisely the problem with the "No Child Left Behind" stuff - it forces classes to progress at the speed of the slowest-learning student. That's just begging for everyone smarter than average to be bored out of their mind - kids need to be engaged, or they'll find something to engage themselves.
This is why I skimmed through high school and never learned to put effort into homework - I wasn't ever given an honest challenge. If I can skim-read the book and BS an essay that earns a B+, why would I carefully read the book and thoughtfully write an essay? There was not much difference between a B+ and an A- or A, especially where the cost of getting the last two grade jumps is a drastic increase in time and effort.
No, I don't have ADD or anything of the sort. I just needed a challenge, and I didn't get it until college, by which time it was almost too late to learn the homework-doing skills I needed.
It's been a while since high school for you, hasn't it? Most students would't know a wireless network from a hair net, even if they had a cell phone capable of accessing one.
Even if they know what wireless is, it's doubtful that a significant number of them know how to crack a WEP key from their phone.
I presume your school was not surrounded by residential areas.
Not within wireless range, no.
No... my wife's a stay-at-home mom, and I'm a programmer. I can take (or make) as many personal calls as I want to. But I don't, because that's what IM is for ;)
Anyway, no active jammer is going to jam just inside the walls, it's going to have a range that extends outside the walls of the school, and probably significantly so.
If they're being forced to walk halfway across the soccer field to make a call, you may as well call it "off the property".
There is a difference between someone who knows how to do something by hand, yet uses a calculator to save time, and someone who uses the calculator to get "mysterious results."
While I understand your point, I think you answered it yourself:
when critical thinking comes into play (real life word problems!) then all your calculators and internets training would be gone to waste.
Which is exactly what we should be focusing on. If a student wants to use a calculator to do the boring integration or derivative calculation, we should let them, because our curriculum should be focusing on real-world problems, not on artificial problems.
In other words, we should be grading based on those real-world problems at least as much as we grade on the "what's d/dx of x^2 + x + 3" type of problem.
If a student doesn't know how to do those real-world problems, they're not going to know how whether or not they've done the calculus by hand or on the calculator.
Physics, for example, is not so much about knowing how to do the math as it is about knowing what equation to apply. Whether or not I use a calculator to get the numeric answer is irrelevant to whether I know which equation to use, and the curriculum should be designed to match.
In my opinion, if banning calculators during a math course makes people get better grades, we're designing the course wrong, because in the real world, you'd better be using a calculator - at least to verify your results, if nothing else!
I'm going to assume there are exceptions for dangerous items in your argument.
That would be a valid assumption.
You can remove the object that is distracting the student, or you can remove the student. Which is in the better interests of the student (and of the classroom)?
Remove the student, if you have to remove anything. A student reading a fantasy book is likely not distracting other students, unless they're mesmerized by the cover art, or if turning the pages is exceptionally noisy.
In any case, if the student is reading instead of paying attention, then the student is obviously not interested; kick them out into the hall and let them keep reading.
A teacher shouldn't be required to walk off the property just to make a quick personal call, especially since a teacher's "break" is usually just a few minutes and they have other things to do as well.
That's fine, sometimes, but it's not practical for my wife while she's breastfeeding the baby, and it doesn't help us receive calls any better (which is what I'm more concerned with than anything).
In the last month or so I've gotten voicemail notifications without a "missed call" notification several times, despite my phone being on the whole time right next to the window.
What public schools do you know of that have an unencrypted WiFi network set up?
Exactly. I think the solution is to engage the students more in the learning process, rather than tying them to a chair with their eyes taped open...
Kids are looking for entertainment. The best teachers I ever had were the ones who made it fun to learn the material. If you're having fun, why would you interrupt that to pull out your phone?
You know, it just occurred to me that this is probably the exact reason there are so many people who don't know how to google for answers. They're taught to pull out a giant textbook, leaf to the currently scheduled chapter, and skim the headings for the answer they need, instead of being taught how anyone in the modern real world would search for answers (Google or somesuch).
I disagree with allowing teachers to confiscate property from students. There are other solutions, I think.
For example, teachers should dock points from a student's grade. This could, of course, lead to the same thing as what "going set" in Pinochle led to with my uncle - he went set so many times that he would bid up ridiculously high knowing he couldn't win anyway. This led to a new house rule - if you go set twice, you can't bid anymore.
*Ahem*. That is, a student might lose so many points that he has no hope of recovering his grade, and would therefore not care about disrupting class more, but I'm sure a sufficiently crafty teacher could come up with a solution. (A bucket into which you could deposit your phone at the beginning of class, in silent mode, in exchange for recovering lost points, perhaps?)
I'm sure there are a dozen things wrong with this particular solution. It's just an idea.
In any case, I'm very uncomfortable with allowing teachers to confiscate a student's personal property.
This is exactly what always bugged me about school. I can imagine this conversation with a professor:
Me: "What? I can't use a calculator to do my physics test?"
Prof: "You have to prove you can solve it!"
Me: "Doesn't knowing how to use the calculator to solve it prove I can solve it?"
Prof: "No, you'd just write a program to solve it for you."
Me: "If I were doing this in the real world, wouldn't I be using a calculator?"
Prof: "... Just do as I say."
I mean really. If you're a physicist, and you're doing complex calculations by hand, wouldn't you be better off if you had a calculator there to do the hard part for you?
Isn't knowing how to make a calculator give you the answer just as good as knowing how to get it by hand (speaking in terms of real-world application)?
They don't have a bias against techs, per se, they're just not willing to pay enough to hire competent ones... or even incompetent ones.
Which reminds me. One year my junior high school decided that rather than, say, buying new text books, or updating the computer lab, they would upgrade the A/C units in the office.
They've got their priorities straight... *sigh*
But even beyond that, they're unwilling to hire enough teachers. Utah law specifies a maximum class size X, so when my little brother got to Kindergarten and the class size was X+15, my mom got angry and forced them to get another Kindergarten teacher.
Guess what they did? They moved a third-grade teacher to Kindergarten.
Three years later, same situation. They just moved the teacher back.
Nobody cared that they were both breaking the law and ruining these kids' education (by not giving them enough one-on-one attention, which was the intent of the max class size law). They only did anything about it because someone yelled at them until they couldn't ignore it anymore - and even then, they just hid the problem, rather than fix it.
There are a lot bigger problems in our schools than cell phones... cell phone use is a symptom, not a disease, and it indicates that students are bored. (If they were interested, they'd be paying attention, right?) Perhaps we could focus on that?
It should be illegal for a teacher to confiscate property from a student. Just because a student is on school property doesn't mean they have no rights regarding search and seizure of personal property. (I'm not sure what the courts have ruled on this, I'm sure they've said something.)
Back in high school, a friend of mine was reading a fantasy novel (Wheel of Time, I think) during class, for whatever reason. (Boredom, probably.) The teacher told him to give her the book, and he'd get it back after class. Instead, he sat on it and said "go ahead and take it."
No teacher who values their job would ever do that - sexual harassment lawsuits could quickly follow. My friend wouldn't have done it, but he knew she wouldn't risk it.
Whether or not my friend was right to disobey the teacher, he was right in one thing - the book was his property, and she had no right to take it from him.
The law requires kids to be in school, but it doesn't require them to pay attention. That has its own consequences.
I think they did that to my apartment building :( (Not really, I bet it was unintentional, but still.)
Inside, I get a weak signal, but once a call comes in the signal quality drops drastically. Two feet outside the door, I get a perfect signal.
Incidentally, does anyone know a (preferably cheap) way to deal with that?
I don't have a landline at home - the only way to reach me is via my cell phone (well, I have an office phone, but I don't give out that number). That means if I were to go pick up my kid from school - assuming we've communicated beforehand where to meet, since my kid couldn't just call me due to the jamming - I'd be unreachable.
There may be teachers that only have a cell phone, like me. Are we really going to prevent them from having access to their only means of personal communication, just so a few kids don't use phones during class?
There are better ways to encourage kids to keep their phones put away. We've all heard the stories of college professors offering to skip a test if no cell phones ring during any lecture.
Or, you know, we could make learning interesting again. This "no child left behind" crap is the biggest offender there, IMO, and it's causing more problems than it's helping. (But then, I'm not an educator, and I don't have school-age kids yet, so I may be wrong.)
Why doesn't anyone realize that they'd be banning teachers from using cell phones as well? I know not all teachers use cell phones, but a lot do, and I doubt they'd be amused that they're suddenly unable to use a cell phone during the portion of the day when the cell phone is most useful (i.e. when they're not at home).
What about all those farmers that the government is paying to not farm? Should we have an appreciation day for them, too?
If you're passing substrings around, you most likely know the size anyway, and if you're doing read-only stuff you don't want the overhead of a string copy.
you can safely operate on a string when you don't have its beginning.
This is a serious benefit for certain applications - a Pascal-style string would require you to copy substrings in order to use them (so it could maintain the length), whereas a C-style string lets you use an arbitrary pointer.
A C program that processes text files (e.g. logfiles) into some other format (e.g. csv files) would probably run much faster in C than in Pascal, if the C program is allowed to take advantage of the aforementioned benefit.
No, they just feel like it. Most of them don't even bother to do any more verification than "make sure you can receive e-mails at ssladmin@domainyouwantacertfor.com".... and that's automated.
In other words, SSL certs are infinite in supply and virtually zero-cost to create, so they're milking them for all they're (apparently) worth.
To be fair, I was imagining the bubble-gum chewing, as well as the eye-rolling and head-bobbing on "hello!"...
Shudder, indeed.
I read that as "cron job" and I was confused for a moment. Time to go get another soda...
They don't? They have, and can, at least to some extent. I'm sure you remember the Sony rootkit fiasco.
Just wait. Soon here they'll be distributing CDs that contain no audio tracks, just some encrypted software that connects to some remote server and streams you the audio. You want to use a stereo? You'll need one of our patented internet-connected stereo input devices - just five easy payments of $29.95! Oh, and that stops working after a year, too.