I find it hard to imagine being conscious but unable to control any part of your body as anything but a terrible nightmare. Shut-in would suck, higher consciousness or not.
My friends are already on telegram, I don't have to force change. I can make any chat more secure from the start. I am not using massive government level secrets anyhow. I mean, security is nice, but my cat photos, bad code, homegrown mint tea, and plans for the beach this coming summer are hardly a top secret problem anyway, I'm not planning a murder, I just don't want meta or facebook using them for advertising. Telegram is good enough.
It has nothing to do with other students though. The school itself is the one with the policy due to the laws surrounding the issue. The students are a whole different situation.
It would be amazing to be able to easily and reliably link comments to places, like r/locationhere might have done in Reddit. I am finding it slow to work that out here.
I suslect one of the reasons brain breaks are happening is that it's nice to have a break as a teacher, too.If it does help retention, it isn't noticeable, but it does help with your relationship with the students, so there's that in its favour. I don't mind about the brain breaks, but the drills and practice were a tried and true method for hundreds of years for a reason; They work, and lead to more output and focus long term. Self motivation is a great skill to have for any future endeavour, even if your job is not related to maths, or biology, or art, or whatever.
One of the activities students always do is "past papers", completing the examination material from historical exams to practice for the real thing. Even the students have pointed out to me the difficulty of the papers has eased in the last twenty years, and the marking rubrics are more forgiving than they were.
As a teacher:
Essays written in exam conditions have become shorter over time. The exam is not shorter in length. A successful art, history, or English HSC exam would be completed with 6, 8 or 12 pages or more in the 1990s, and now likely has half those pages. Still 1.5 or 2 hours or three hours long, as it was back in the 90s.
Maths? "Brain breaks" are in vogue. 20 years ago, a high level senior student (age 16-18) would be expected to do calculus for a two hour "double" lesson. Now if they work on calculus for half an hour, they expect to have a ten minute break and start work again. Does this make the student more productive? No, they complete less pages of the same textbook. Newer textbooks, correspondingly, have far less physical work in them than textbooks written 20 years ago.
The "non academic" track? There are less apprenticeships available, and students get rejected from the few that exist. 40 years ago the NSW trains had 200 apprenticeships a year. Now they have four a year. We have had apprentices sent back to us two weeks in with the (fail level) complaint "won't put his phone away." The teen is then put back in the academic track, as education opportunities are compulsory, and they learn nothing as the accusation is true.
Yes, with this evidence, you might be right about this lot.
Yep. It's irritating, because it would be so easy to make interesting material out of the data they are starting with.