it's less different for more reasons than you'd probably like to think. but yeah, i do think reading is much preferable, and was making the point that when it comes to being distracted from education, it doesn't really matter via interaction with what medium.

Ok, I got a good laugh out of this one.

the worst part is that my partner is an educator and this was a genuine example she gave when describing to me the conversation her colleagues had about their upcoming no-tolerance cell phone policy and exceptions they'd need to generally try to abide by to not overpolice the kids.

It doesn't, especially. The phone is a bridge between the continuous glucose monitor and the pump. Pairing two devices to a common piece of technology is easier to troubleshoot and less error-prone than trying to make the two devices talk to each other directly, and allows some of the work to be offloaded to a general purpose computer rather than having to build all of that into the devices themselves. These are things that have to work, so reducing the number of things they have to do is a safety feature. The phone can also share data from the monitor whenever it's online, versus the old situation where you'd have to bring your monitor in and hope your care team remembers to download the results.

Some pumps do pair directly to the monitors, but that often locks you into a specific configuration of monitor and pump and often costs more.

It is such a marginal use case it is irrelevant. 2024 JAMA says "Among youths, the reported prevalence of type 1 diabetes (per 1000) was 3.5 (95% CI, 2.8-4.4)". And not all of those have fancy insulin pumps.

As an accommodation, it would be plausible to lock down a phone to do whatever the minimum required is for this and nothing else. No social apps, no telephony, no camera. Networking disabled or severely restricted.

I find the deployment of people with chronic health conditions as a gimmick to win a badly constructed arguments very distasteful.

you didn't even make an argument man, you said some old man yells at cloud nonsense about how your experience means you're right.

also i didn't "call you" a reactionary. i said you are being reactionary. there's a difference.

Your argument in favor of disallowing kids from using cell phones in school is "ask folks who went to school before cellphones were ubiquitous, how crucial they actually are"

I don't really have a dog in this race because I'm unconvinced of either side, but that's a poor argument. You should actually present a response to how each of the problems that are currently solved by phones would otherwise be addressed.