counter argument: rules are meant to be followed to the letter and not a micrometer further. if a rule specifies that you only have to surrender phones the day after they were spotted then what constitutes the same phone is the most important question.
Comment on Philosophy moment
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day agoBetter response than the teacher’s:
Points for trying, but your series of questions are irrelevant non sequiturs.
Phones are banned, not just your, or any other particular physically manifested instance of the sublime, intangible, transcendent ideal of ‘a phone’.
desktop_user@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 day ago
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 21 hours ago
Nah, doesn’t matter, the point of the rule is to dissuade phone use in class, because it disrupts learning.
Would this lead to potentially confiscating the ‘wrong’ phone?
Sure, but it doesn’t matter.
If the kid wants to bring a totally new phone to school, every single day, then each phone they bring would be confiscated.
The idea is to impose a cost, a penalty, to disruptive behavior, as well as actually remove the thing that is the source/cause of the disruptive behavior.
If the kid is stealing other kid’s phones and getting them confiscated, now we are into another ruleset of ‘you can’t fucking steal things, that’s a crime actually.’
…
Also you are assuming the student is correctly characterizing the rule via its construction as a question.
Could be a leading question from a false premise.
‘Why do you hate puppies and kick kittens?’
They’ve already demonstrated other rhetorical sophistry, none of the other comments imply that this is actually the rule, the rule itself is not actually provided, we don’t actually know what the actual rule is.
…
But, you’re right that this could actually be an accurate characterization of the rule, teachers and schools do often implement ridiculous or poorly thought out, inefficient, easily gamed or difficult to enforce rules.
Back when I was in school, as cell phones were just becoming a widely available thing…
You set your phone on vibrate, and if it keeps going off, over and over, presumably this means someone or multiple people are urgently trying to contact you for some very important reason.
At that point you excuse yourself from the class, and look at your call log or texts or your voicemails.
If it actually is serious, tell your teacher what is going on, and they’ll send you to the office to either wait for someone to arrive or get you to the school therapist or whatever is appropriate.
Pretty much anything other than that is disruptive behavior.
Use something like a 3 strike rule before you confiscate a phone on the 3rd strike, and you get your phone back at the end of the school day.
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Ok, so I went diving into the actual reddit thread, and as best I can tell, this is the actual full source document of questions and answers.
docs.google.com/document/d/…/mobilebasic
Going off of many other questions and answers, it appears the policy does confiscate a phone at the moment it is being used outside of permitted times and settings, and is then returned to the student at the end of the day for infraction 1, and all subsequent infractions require the parent to pick up the phone after confiscation.
A 2 strike rule set, I guess.
… However:
Anytime an official response is ‘Technically, yes’… yeah, they fucked up in the construction of their rule set.
… It would seem to me that a straightforward resolution to this problem would be that… in the event that infraction 2 occurs at the end of the day, just… confiscate the phone, and require a parent to pick it up, either at the end of that same school day, or after a 24 hour period if they really want to have a mandatory confiscation time as part of the punishment.
Part of the point of requiring a parent to pick up the phone is to basically mandate actual parental awareness of the issue, and they are already doing that…
So, infraction 2 escalates by now requiring the parent to pick up the phone, wheras infraction 1 does not.
I would think the escalation to getting a parent to pick it up would be a sufficient punishment, and the idea of some kind of… mandated minimum confiscation time scheme for the phone seems stupid, so long as the parent can pick up the phone after school has ended for the day.
But at the same time, there does appear to be some kind of admin acknowledged idea that… a phone would have to be essentially volunteered to be reconfiscated when a student returns on a subsequent day… which seems to me to be nonsensical and unenforceable without a mandated search of the kid… they could always just not bring the phone on day 2, and then you’d have to verify they are not lying… which is ass backwards presumption of guilt untill proved innocent that results in an unwarranted violation of their rights, even though they are complying with the general intent, the spirit of the rules.
I cannot reverse engineer the actual precise ruleset from this alone lol.
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Finally, as an aside … much of the reddit thread this is from make the arguement that cell phones shouldn’t be banned because what if school shooting.
So… 1, … all public schools… have… landline phones. They can dial out.
Ah, but what if the lines are all cut, or people can’t reach them?
2, … then just mandate that phones are not 100% literally physically banned… you just keep them off, or on silent, or on vibrate, and don’t use them during class.
d00ery@lemmy.world 1 day ago
The teachers answer is perfect. If the phone has the same number then it’s the same phone. If it has a different number then it’s going to be a pain for the student to update all his contacts “new phone, who dis”
user224@lemmy.sdf.org 1 day ago
And the original SIM could still be used in some cheap older phone.
Although it seems everything in the US is a plan, meaning monthly payments. But perhaps I haven’t looked far enough.
Korhaka@sopuli.xyz 1 day ago
You can get phones here for like £5, what kind of plan would that even be?
user224@lemmy.sdf.org 22 hours ago
Well, probably my mistake calling it a plan, but it seems all of them are subscriptions at least. Even “pay as you go” cards I found have monthly payments.
It seems the cheapest was T-Mobile PayGo, but that got sold to Ultra Mobile. I don’t know what they offer though because there’s an infinite captcha on their website for me. But from Google preview it seems they still offer the $3/month PayGo.
Korhaka@sopuli.xyz 1 day ago
So my phone is still the same phone as when I had a flip phone in the 2000s?
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
… Or, you could swap out only the SIM card, have a new number, and the rest of the phone is literally exactly the same.
Most kids these days use social media apps for messenging and general time wasting in class… all they’d have to do is update their phone number with the major apps they use before they come into school the next day… all the contacts are in the apps themselves, not the OS’s contact list.
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Either way, you’re still missing the point that the kid’s entire question line is literally a non sequitur, a misdirect, a distraction via tangential discussion.
You are falling into the trap of bothering to engage in the actual ship of Theseus ‘what actually constitutes the same phone’ argument that the teacher has.
The teacher, and you, do not realize that that is irrelevant, and were this some kind of debate bro / debate club debate, you would both have fallen for a rhetorical trap, wasting time arguing over something not germaine to the actual topic.
It doesn’t matter if the kid has millionaire parents and legitimately purchased and owned a brand new phone with a live phone plan every single day, and brought it to school.
Or if the kid stole phones, borrowed someone elses phone and was caught with it.
The rule is ‘no phones in class upon pain of confiscation’.
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Whether or not it is literally or philosophically the same phone, or a legitimately owned phone, or that particular student’s legitimately owned phone has absolutely no relevance.
… Its like how if you bring alcohol, drugs, or a gun to a school… whether or not they are your items doesn’t matter, whether or not its a single shot derringer or a full assault rifle doesn’t matter.
user224@lemmy.sdf.org 1 day ago
I hate to break it to you, but we’re talking about HS, in 2025. Most people don’t use phone numbers for m