A laptop in the classroom was once a learning tool that appealed to all professors, giving students a hassle-free way to take notes and look up info online.
Recently, however, they’ve come under fire for their ability to look up info online.
In an opinion piece for the Christian Science Monitor, Timothy Snyder, a Yale history professor, describes how laptops make it impossible for even the most committed students to pay attention and how just the glow of the screens can distract students using a good old pen and paper.
Thanks to the rise of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and thousands of other online distractions, Synder argues that the temptation is now too great for a student to be able to just focus on a lecture when an instructor starts to drag on.
To an extent, this argument has some merit; could the average student say they could focus on what the teacher was saying if their neighbor was watching “30 Rock” on Hulu.com? Or if they were on a laptop themselves, could they resist the temptation to open Firefox?
The problem with this argument is that if teachers are really concerned about laptops distracting others, the fix is simple; send them to the back of the class.
Most of them are probably sitting there already. It’s where the outlets are.
As for the laptop users distracting themselves, every instructor with a decent-sized class has probably realized that no act of man or God can make a student pay attention to a lecture.
Take away all technology, and they’ll doodle in a notebook. Or just stare into space.
It’s every student’s personal responsibility to tune into what’s going on in class.
If they want to use that time to look at cats dancing on YouTube, then that’s their prerogative.
In his article, Snyder points out how these students, if we don’t outright ban all laptops from classes everywhere, could then go on to be employees who can’t focus in the workplace.
The thing is that if these students, regardless of what field they get into, will probably be using a computer at their job.
What better time to learn how to abstain from Internet distractions than in the classroom?
As a person who has had to live with ADD, severe enough to require different medications at various points in my life, I can say that the hallmark of a determined mind is not the ability to tune into a subject in an empty room.
It’s the ability to ignore a room full of distractions and focus on what’s important at the moment.
