Enough Is Enough

There was an article in yesterday’s CT NewsJunkie about students getting disconnected from school, one of the things they mentioned was cellphones in the classrooms. So that got me thinking…

Cellphone Bans in School Are Back. How Far Will They Go?
More schools are moving to limit or outright ban the use of cellphones inside and outside the classroom. What do educators have to say?
NEA Today
By Tim Walker
February 3, 2023

Key Takeaways

•     According to the National Center for Education Statistics, in 2020, cellphone bans were in place in 76% of U.S. schools.
•     Some districts and schools have much broader restrictions on cellphones than others. However, struggles with student behavior and mental health have prompted many schools to restrict access to the devices.
•     Research shows that cellphones are a major distraction in classrooms. But some experts, concerned about the impact on school culture, urge leaders not to implement overly restrictive policies.

I attended grad school for 2007 until 2011 and I saw first hand how cellphones are used in class.

Patrick Danz did not enter the teaching profession to police cellphones in his classroom. He began his career in 2007, just as phones and social media began to tighten their grip on consumers and teenagers. So, while he expected new technologies to be a part of his classroom, he didn’t anticipate being in constant competition with them for students’ attention.

“This is a battle throughout the day,” Danz says. “And it’s exhausting.”

Heads down thumbs wiggling.

If he could, Danz would ban cellphones school-lwide [sic] -—that is, forbid students from using them during instructional hours. If every classroom had the same rule, he believes the policy would be more enforceable and effective.

That's a step more districts and schools are taking. Cellphone bans in school never went away, but prior to the pandemic, resistance had begun to subside. Current trends, however, suggest that newfound patience with the devices is quickly fading.

You could tell that they were texting, one would be looking down at their lap and then look up at another student when they look at their lap.

By 2020, however, the percentage of schools with cellphone bans had jumped to 77 percent, according to recently-released data from the National Center for Education Statistics.

The scope of these bans varies, along with the rationale. School leaders who have instituted more expansive restrictions (including outside the classroom) believe a cell phone-free environment will lead to less incidents of cyberbullying, improve attendance, and reduce time on social media (and associated mental health problems). The most often-cited reason is to improve engagement in class.

They spent thousands of dollars on tuition and they are passing texts back and forth!!!

As you can tell I am in favor of a ban, back in undergraduate school the new tech product was calculators… the haves and have nots. The have nots, were using their slide rulers to calculate the answers on a quizzes. The haves punched in the numbers and got an answer. The haves also had calculators that you could store equations on them. That was when the profs said enough! The gap between the haves and have nots got to be too great.

Now it is the smartphone where you can text another student for the answers and the schools are saying enough again.

On Monday I am going to be a guest lecturer in a college class and I am will to bet that at least one student will be texting during the class.

What are your thoughts?

online polls

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More on the election of Rep. Mike Johnson as Speaker of the House.

Dems Turn Mike Johnson’s First Viral Moment Into Anti-GOP Ad
‘NEXT QUESTION’
Democrats are testing whether a moment when Republicans shouted down a reporter for asking about Mike Johnson’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election will have a political impact.
The Daily Beast
By Riley Rogerson
October 26, 2023


When House Republicans held an impromptu press conference late Tuesday night to celebrate coalescing around their new speaker nominee, they were in no mood to answer tough questions—or even the obvious one.

So when ABC reporter Rachel Scott asked Rep. Mike Johnson (R-LA)—the speaker nominee who has now been elevated to the speakership—about his leading efforts to overturn the 2020 election, Republicans were having none of it.

They drowned out the reporter with boos. Johnson said “next question.” And Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC) told the reporter to “shut up!”

Now, a D.C.-based advocacy group, Courage For America, is seizing on the moment to attack Republicans and quickly define the new speaker.

And here is the ad!

In another HuffPost article,

New Speaker Mike Johnson’s Long History With The Religious Right
Come for the Noah's Ark theme park, stay for the relentless efforts to strip women's and LGBTQ+ rights.
By Jennifer Bendery
October 25, 2023

Newly elected House Speaker Mike Johnson’s path in Republican politics began with a yearslong role as the senior attorney and national spokesperson for a group on the religious right dedicated to dismantling LGBTQ+ freedoms and outlawing abortion.

Johnson worked for that organization, Alliance Defending Freedom, for eight years, from 2002 to 2010, before serving a brief stint as a Louisiana state legislator and then heading to Congress in 2017. He first became a known entity in his state in the late 1990s when he and his wife went on national television as the face of Louisiana’s new marriage covenant laws, which made it harder to get a divorce.

The social conservative causes that have fueled Johnson’s rise, many of which are deeply unpopular with the American public, are already worrisome to Democrats who fear that Johnson — who downplayed the concept of the separation of church and state as recently as April — may try to use the power of the speakership to advance his extreme views.

The future is not looking good at all!

Opinion | The Harsh Truth Behind the Republicans’ Speaker Crisis
Mike Johnson’s victory doesn’t solve the House GOP’s big problem.
Politico
By Rich Lowry
October 26, 2023

It always had to be Mike Johnson.

The Louisiana Republican has come out of nowhere to ascend to the speaker of the House, a job that people spend their entire adult lives aspiring to, but that Johnson picked up like a stray nickel.

Chairman of the conservative Republican Study Committee is usually the stepping-stone to, well, some other lower-rung of the House leadership, yet Johnson has somehow leveraged the position to become second in the line of succession to the president of the United States.

Johnson is a talented man, and perhaps will prove an adept speaker, despite his lack of experience with a political, legislative and fundraising challenge at this level. Regardless, the dirty secret of the GOP speaker fight was that the stakes were always fairly low, since there are limits to what any leader can do with a slender majority in one chamber of Congress when a Democrat occupies the White House.

Remember!

November 13^th is just two weeks away and the House has to pass the budget or the government shuts down!

Some within the party’s right flank have developed a mode of operating that is almost hostile to affecting legislative outputs as a matter of principle. Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz and his compatriots didn’t help Rep. Kevin McCarthy pass a Republican-supported spending bill as a shutdown loomed, then slammed him for — what else was he supposed to do? — going to Democrats.

[…]

Another factor is the rise of the cult of the outsider. This is a phenomenon in the culture more broadly; people tend to be shaped by institutions less than they once were and be most comfortable in a posture of opposition and defiance. In Republican politics, Donald Trump is the prime example — he was president of the United States but still often sounded like a powerless critic of his own administration.

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My predictions!

• First, that the government is going to shutdown because the Republicans will put riders on it blocking funding of Ukraine.
• Second, we are going to to see a national anti-abortion bills.
• Third, we are going to anti-trans bills
• Fourth we are going to see an anti-marriage equality bill.
• Fifth, we are going to see more pro-Trump input.
• Sixth, we are going to see a budget axe chopping away at the "safety net" programs like WIC, Head Start, SNAP.
  

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Update: 11:15 AM

CNN reports...

 Indeed, the nomination speech that New York Rep. Elise Stefanik gave for Johnson was pure red meat for the party. She accused the left of wanting to stop paying for police, being weak on defense and undermining the values of the nation. She railed against President Joe Biden’s “radical, failed, far-left Democrat policies” on energy and warned that the government had been “illegally weaponized” against “we the people.” For comparison, Speaker Tip O’Neill in 1984 condemned as the “lowest thing” he had seen in his career in Congress the attacks on the patriotism of Democrats leveled by then-Georgia Rep. Newt Gingrich and his allies on televised House proceedings when Democrats weren’t present to respond. That was child’s play compared to Stefanik’s words. 

On almost every issue, Johnson is hard right. He has been a staunch opponent of same-sex marriage. He has been at the forefront of opposing reproductive rights. He opposed funding for Ukraine. He wants to deregulate the economy, cut taxes and deny the very real problems facing our climate. He supported “expunging” former President Donald Trump’s second impeachment and has questioned the Justice Department for how it has handled investigations into Hunter Biden. 

Some thoughts from yesterday:
 

A friend posted something on Facebook that got me thinking:

    The new Speaker was anointed by Trump.
    The House is in lock step and are taking orders from Trump who doesn't hold public office.
    The new Speaker is an election denier.

What she posted was a question, is this setting up for a coup in 2024 if the election doesn't go Trump way?