- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
Middle school removes bathroom mirrors to stop kids from making TikToks::Southern Alamance Middle School in Graham, North Carolina has taken drastic steps to reduce the time kids spend outside of class.
The school could provide a time and space for learning how to make better videos. It doesn’t have to be a fuck off and make tiktoks in lieu of going to curriculum classes. Make it something akin to a vocational class, even if an extra-curricular. Less a space for kids to fuck off during the day to make lame tiktoks and more of a means of teaching video production and the things that go into it. Photography, editing software, basic equipment operation, how to properly record audio, lighting, all of that type off thing.
This may sound ridiculously expensive, but I have seen schools have classes, and clubs, that do just this for just over two thousand dollars. This won’t stop kids from being disruptive with whatever bullshit is popular at the time, nothing will, but it can enrich those that do these things with actual interest in the craft.
I hope that works better for other schools than it did for mine.
Most of the students that went to the school that I went to opted for a “spare” class instead of taking photography, business, arts, programming, or any of the other creative courses. The tools were there in my case, but most people just ignored them in favour of being able to leave school early, or in favour of taking an extra long lunch. They ignored the after school stuff too, because they wanted to spend time with their friends somewhere else.
We had a pretty good photography course too, they covered almost everything and there was even an option to take it for multiple years/grades if you wanted to learn even more about it. The kids at my school who usually did things like Tik Tok and Vine in the bathroom didn’t seem to really care for those courses. Social media was just fun for them, they never intended on making anything of it.
There has to be some solution that we aren’t seeing yet. There has to be some common ground between “let the kids do whatever they want, regardless of their education” and “dystopian hell”.
It would also help if kid’s parents were more involved overall, although you could also argue that a huge part of the cause is the insane hours that many of the parents have to spend working to let the family survive.
This all sucks. I hope someone is able to make your idea work, truly. We need a solution, asap.
My school had a TV production class that went into a lot of what you’re talking about. Stuff like setting up multiple cameras for an interview/news-type show, following the action while maintaining a sense of the big picture with a single camera at a sporting event, that sort of thing. Even had a workstation with shiny new digital editing software and a DVD burner so you didn’t have to shuffle VHS tapes (or their various forms) around.
I’d love to see an updated version of this where they also get into privacy, safety and bullying/harassment since those don’t tend to be the first things a kid will think about when installing the video app of the day. Let them know what they’re giving up and then teach the methods to do it right.