Curios of the week #8

Clippings, endnotes and other ephemera

Image via AI

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This week, Australians commemorated ANZAC day. This is when we remember those who fell in service of our country, as well as the many veterans of conflict. ‘ANZAC’ stands for the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps and the date of ANZAC day reflects the landing of ANZACs troops on the Gallipoli peninsula in the First World War.

On Wednesday, I found myself giving a short speech at our ANZAC assembly, about Richard Martin, an aboriginal man who fought at Gallipoli and later in France, where he was killed in action. Aboriginal men who fought in the First World War were treated as equals in combat, but not when they returned home. ANZAC day gives us much to reflect upon.

This week’s curios include a hot take about mobile phones in classrooms, suspensions and exclusions in the US, generative learning — whatever that is — a messy dive into neuroscience in the classroom, a cartoon and much more.

Hot take of the week

An article in The Conversation bears the headline, “School phone bans seem obvious but could make it harder for kids to use tech in healthy ways.” They should have just stopped at, “School phone bans seem obvious.” My place banned the use of phones between 8.30am and 3.30pm back in 2019 and we have not looked back.

If it is not on-its-face obvious enough to you why this would help then let me remind you that learning is all about attention. If you introduce to the classroom a device that has been extensively engineered and iterated to draw attention, with no requirement to be educational, it will simply outcompete classroom instruction.

However, if you want the alternative view, the authors of the article offer the following:

“An obvious omission from this lineup is students. As studies of phone bans overseas show, children’s views are highly important as they are the policy receivers and beneficiaries.”

Which is classic educational progressivism… and:

“…bans make it likely we will leave our children without skills they need to be able to learn, work and live in a world saturated with technology. This includes their home and bedroom where they do their homework after school.”

This assumes there are ‘skills’ around mobile phone use that students need to learn, rather than it being a simple issue of self-control.