Science teacher jammed his school kids' phones, gets week suspension A high school teacher in Tampa Bay, Florida, has been suspended without pay for using a jamming device to keep students off their cellphones. Science teacher Dean Liptak will spend five days on the naughty step at Fivay High School for employing a device that prevented nearby phones from making or receiving calls, sending and …
For those too stupid to realise that they are there to learn not send cat piccies to their friends.
The School District needs to make a policy.
Use a phone in a lesson and you FAIL the course. That will screw up the GPA's for those little darlings/cherubs wanting to go to Harvard Law and spend the rest of their lives screwing the rest of us (or get a 1st Draft pick for any of the sillier US Sports)
"It's never a good idea for your first response to be the same as your last resort."
Sometimes that's just learning cause and effect. Life doesn't always have a respawn
Kids are programmed to keep searching until they get pushback. This roll-over-and-appease-the-darlings attitude is why kids keep doing more and more outrageous things until someone gets severely hurt or there is significant pushback.
It is one of the reasons I let my minor son start reloading and mess around with explosives. This is serious shit sonny. Screw up and you will maim someone.
Give one kid an F and the rest of the kids will get the message. Unfortunately the parents will likely just lawyer up and the kids will be given the message that the school system can be pushed around and it will all be undone.
What do you do with the rejects, then?
Teach them how to cope with failure and rejection when they're still young enough to cry on Mummy's shoulder and get over it. That is far better than making it seem that they never fail, until they finally get into the real world and fail at something important (as we all do). At that point they have no idea how to cope, but are too 'old' and self-conscious to ask for help. That's what leads to suicides.
The thing is, in a cutthroat world such as ours, ONE mistake is usually enough to dead-end you (that's what brings up sucides in eastern countries like Japan--failure is not an option for them since it brings shame not just to them but to their family). We perpetually live with the Sword of Damocles over our heads. Get flunked out of school, you get labeled as an idiot and no one wants to hire you. Get fired once, especially at a low-end job, you get blackmarked as a troublemaker and no one wants to hire you again. Demand a decent pay and you get passed over for someone who willingly starves to death working unspeakable conditions for a crumb of bread. Since you basically NEED a job to survive here, being banished from work basically means you're banned from the straight-and-narrow path, which means you'll end up forcefully diverted to one of two alternatives: crashing (suicide) and and taking the crooked path (crime).
Put shortly, the dreaded "F" might as well be called, "GAME OVER. You lose. Better Luck Next Life. Oh, that's right. YOU ONLY HAVE ONE LIFE!"
You're losing touch with reality. My wife was fired from Wal-Mart (long story - the short version is that even the store manager said it wasn't her fault but the termination came down from the corporate headquarters so his hands were tied), then a couple years later flunked out of her fourth attempt at college (after having dropped out 3 times - Don't get me started, but it's her own fault). Now she works a very good job in a retail back office.
"You're losing touch with reality. My wife was fired from Wal-Mart (long story - the short version is that even the store manager said it wasn't her fault but the termination came down from the corporate headquarters so his hands were tied), then a couple years later flunked out of her fourth attempt at college (after having dropped out 3 times - Don't get me started, but it's her own fault). Now she works a very good job in a retail back office."
Trust me. You are very much the exception. I've seen many an HR department take one look at a government-issued employment record, notice one little detail, and toss it out without a second glance. Usually it's some criminal conviction (felonies definitely, misdemeanors maybe, traffic offenses for drivers) or having dropped out of school or previously been fired.
"Learning cause and effect" doesn't exclude the possibility of a graduated response to misdemeanours.
Discipline is a hard thing to learn, but making it arbitrarily harsh is not going to make it any easier. You need a range of sanctions, of escalating severity, and keep going up the scale until either you reach the top, or the perp falls into line, because if you've got it anything close to right, the huge majority of perps will fall into line long before you get to the top.
Going directly to the top of the range is like - you park illegally, a cop wanders by and instead of ticketing your car, they lurk nearby and when you come back, they shoot you.
That's not going to teach anyone "justice" or "respect for rules".
The problem of course is that it's often the students who are already earning an "F" who are the ones using cellphones in class. In "progressive" schools such as those in Seattle, where the district cares more about fashionable social theories than actual learning, that just means the student will be moved to an activity in the school where he/she will take up even more staff time.
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If a teacher did that I bet the parents would raise hell, because they want to be able to text their kids to let them know they're going to be late to pick them up or worrying "what if there's a school shooting and Johnny's phone is locked up so I can't reach him?"
Don't know how my generation survived where the only way for parents to contact us during school hours was to call the main office and have us paged over the intercom. Never happened to me, but I remember it happening once in a while. It was always bad news, like someone died, not "I'm going to be late picking up you". That wasn't a problem because unless there was a blizzard, other than the few who took the bus, we walked home.
Wow, so when you ring your kid during a school shooting, the sound of his phone going off alerts the shooter to his location. Said hid only needs to know mummy dear is going to be late when he exits the classroom, not during the lesson.
As to the need to dial 911, do US schools not have land lines any more?
There is a simple film you can apply to classroom windows to shield the room from mobile signals, it's used in some quiet railway carriages, and secure sites.
The film works on railway carriages because they are mostly metal, and the windows are the only place the signal can get in or out.
The same is not true for schools. Brick, cinder block, low density concrete blocks, curtain wall on steel skeletons, terrapin huts (sorry, showing my age there) are all porous to mobile phone signals. You'd have to line the whole room with the film.
Easier/cheaper to wrap the entire exterior in grounded conductive mesh. Doesn't need to be fancy, probably 1cm openings are more than small enough to block all cellular frequencies. You can leave the film off the windows in the office, teacher's lounge, and student lounge/cafeteria so there are places they work.
Doing the blocking on the exterior allows wifi to still work where desired. Obviously they'll only permit student devices to access it in designated areas as allowing them to access it on their phones in classrooms defeats the purpose of blocking cellular.
If they're worried about "how do I call 911 for a school shooter" install a phone (traditional or VOIP) in each classroom that can only call the office and 911. Today they solely rely on "everyone has a cell phone" - the next school shooter just needs to order a high powered jammer on the internet and plug it in to his car's cigarette lighter before he goes on a rampage. I doubt he's going to be too concerned with FCC penalties at that point...
Goot idea in theory.. In practice, there's the slight problem of planning permission and the cost of refitting the room(s). Not to mention permission from the school.
It would be something the school may be able to implement, but the teacher almost certainly wouldn't be able to.
Guess you read the headline and failed to read the article. That actually is school policy (well maybe not the Faraday box) and the teacher was too lazy to follow it.
I was all for the leniency at the headline point, then I read and comprehended what he actually did. The phone company wasn't there because a couple of kids didn't get text messages while in his class. The idiot took out the cell tower that was serving the larger region, meaning all kinds of people who weren't students in school.
I did read the article. The confiscation as far as I interpreted it is carried out when a disruption involving a phone happens, for which he has to fill out a form each time a student refuses to give him their phone. It doesn't say it is school policy to take everyone's phone and put it in a box at the beginning of lesson at all.
The parents are just as culpable as the students, they text and call their kids while they are in class knowing full well that the school policy is that these devices are supposed to be off and out of sight.
As to this guy, well I can understand his motivation but even a cursory examination of the law would have shown him that this was a big no-no, he's lucky Verizon or indeed the FCC aren't taking action.
Don't parents teach that to their sprog anymore? Once upon a time, parents taught children how to show respect for where they were. If in a classroom, respect the teacher and the others in the room. In a theater, respect the other patrons. I could go on but you get the idea.
The adults are no better. Kids template off their parents, so guess what - the kids lose respect too.
Yesterday I had an electrician come around for 10 minutes to look at what needs to be done. During those ten minutes he cut off the conversation 6 times to answer his phone and talk to someone else. As a result we had to repeat parts of the conversation twice and I'm pretty sure he made some mistakes in the notes he took.
I realise his time is important, but guess what: so is mine. I had to take time away from my work to talk to him. If he had just turned off the phone we could have been done in 5 minutes.
It is difficult. As a self employed person I have to answer the phone when it rings - it is likely a job, & an emergency at that. So whilst it is rude, & I'll apologise, I'll not ignore it unless I know it is something I can ignore.
Plus, it could well be money! You get a salary, regardless of how long you sit on your backside or how hard you work. My income is directly related to how hard I work, & my rate is still, for a call out at midnight, still likely less than many here get per hour.
Once I walk from your job, having solved your emergency or need, it'll be likely years or even decades before further work is needed. So I need to pull in the work, & not answering the phone is a sure way to go out of business fast.
I respect my customers, but I have to answer the phone.
Or you could pony up and pay for a receptionist service. They can text you the subject of the call and you can generally read a text and absorb the importance while not intruding on your existing customer's time. I get paid to handle calls (IT support) so I know where you are coming from but I cannot just dump one customer I am in front of to talk to another unless the situation is critical, usually not even then. The call handling service answer immediately, respond politely and escalate the calls to me as SMS text instantly, with a follow up phone call shortly thereafter if I don't acknowledge the text.
Seriously, pay someone else to help you if it's that important to your business because pissing off your potential or existing clients is a lot more expensive that finding new ones and I tend to think that if you don't get repeat business it's because you aren't looking for it... For example - when you open or replace a lock do you always do a quick free "security check" of the windows and other doors? Highlight the garage door and garage access to the house as weak points, or the conservatory or even the shed. There's always something...
@ YetAnotherLocksmith
Your situation doesnt seem to be getting much sympathy but I wouldnt have a problem waiting if you had a business call to deal with. Just as I would expect you to wait while I answer the office phone to a client. The only difference I see is that you are mobile while I am in a fixed location.
> Just as I would expect you to wait while I answer the office phone to a client.
"I know you've gone to the trouble of coming here to talk to me in person, but you're just going to have to stand there and twiddle your thumbs while I deal with people who haven't. Whoever it is who's calling, I know they're more important than you."
This truly has become a vicious circle. Customers call, you don't answer immediately, they call someone else. Respect all the way around in needed both from the contractor/tradesman, etc. to the customers.
I always get kudos for not picking in the middle of a conversation. My voicemail says simply: "I'm with a customer right now. Please leave a voicemail and when I get back you I will give you the same attention I'm giving this customer which is, my full, undivided attention."
Those that have no patience for this message (and there have been a few who think they are minor dieties) don't get called back. Mutual respect is a two-way street
"I respect my customers, but I have to answer the phone."
This is fair, but there are limits too though. The Cardiologyst that was assigned to me after some surgery, in the space of nearly an hour of consultation, spent about half of it on a personal phone call, nothing related to work. Hands free. So he not only appeared to not give a shit about my time, ditto for the time of his assoicate, who's privacy was clearly of upmost importance too.
To be fair though, this might be a job thing, I've worked with contractors who spend mere seconds taking jobs, and the odd times they do talk to friends, they talk and work at the same time.
To which behaviour you should simply have said "If you take one more phone call you will lose the business, get a bad review on (relevant local review site) and I will bill you for my wasted time."
Or, before getting to that point (ie at the start of the visit) explain that he isn't to take calls because you don't have the time to wait / waste.
Mind you the number of times I've stood behind someone in a queue who wasted my time and the relevant cashier's time because they were on the phone instead of packing / paying etc. clearly show the lack of respect goes both ways...
Its hard to believe that someone will interrupt a conversation with someone in the flesh to answer a phone, but people do!
In my shop there is talk of a legendary Carpet Layer, if anyone interrupted him to answer a phone his party trick was to lean in and cut the person's tie off with a Stanley knife. I doubt that its true, but its a lovely thought.
Jammers dont discriminate between 911/999 calls or otherwise. They simply flood the area with rf noise. They are fairly low powered though (2-4 watts) for a hand held device. Sometimes they can block a 100sqm area, sometimes a 1sqm area.. Depends on lots of factors.
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