At 10:30 on a Monday morning, you struggle to get through your astronomy lecture, and you decide to check Facebook for just one minute to regain some semblance of sanity. Before you know it, the professor reminds the class of an assignment due Wednesday and tells students to enjoy the rest of their day. The “Notes” Word document open on your computer remains essentially untouched.
I have not taken astronomy, but I spent a good number of my other classes doing exactly what I just described. I learn enough to make an acceptable grade, but months later I retain none of the material. On the other hand, I still remember themes and topics from my classes with no-laptop policies. Although I’ve personally learned that a laptop ban increases classroom attention and material retention, as well as raises the caliber of class discussions, I still grimace just the same when I read a new syllabus and see that the professor has banned laptops in class. Despite my delight whenever I see that I can use my laptop in class, I understand how they are harmful to the learning environment. As such, I believe that professors should be able to ban them in classrooms — in fact, I encourage them to do so.
We are all adults here at Dartmouth, and we should be treated as such. Part of that is doing away with perceived paternalistic policies that micromanage what we can and cannot do. The laptop policy is not one of these policies. Being treated like adults does not mean the freedom to do anything we want while in professional settings -— which for students, classrooms are. Wasting away one’s 11 on Tumblr is therefore inappropriate. It would be just as inappropriate for a professor to whip out his or her iPhone and check Facebook during their lecture, and I hope I never enter Parkhurst to see an administrator buying new shoes on Zappos. These rules are not in place to unnecessarily control us; they serve to improve work efficiency and efficacy, which benefits everyone.
What you put up on your screen affects more than yourself. If you check ESPN or catch up on some online shopping, you distract the students in the rows behind you. Moreover, when you are distracted, you prevent yourself from effectively participating in class discussions. In my freshman seminar, weeks passed with all of us typing aimlessly on our computers and staying silent when my professor asked questions to the group. Finally, she had all of us stand up as she walked by and checked our computers. At most, two students were actually typing up notes. She banned computers from then on, and class discussions improved drastically.
Ultimately, we are at Dartmouth to learn. Organizing your club’s next meeting via blitz, flitzing your 10A crush, and creating Facebook events for your social house can all wait until class is over. When extracurriculars and social commitments bleed into academic settings, they degrade the quality and quantity of learning. The professors should be able to determine the nature of each class, which means they must have the ability and agency to guide what happens in their classroom. The ostensible reason they are professors is that they are qualified to teach in the most effective way they know how, and as students, we should trust their judgment. If my professor decides that laptop use inhibits how he teaches his class, then I will defer to his professional judgment. At the very least, all small discussion based classes and even small lecture classes should have no-laptop policies (students with learning disabilities exempted, of course). Laptop use is less harmful in large lecture classes in which little discussion happens. But even then, laptops are a privilege, not a necessity. And privileges are often abused.
The benefits to using laptops in the classroom, which mostly distill to quickly typing legible notes and looking up supplementary information, are almost always fewer than the costs. Laptops distract you, your classmates and your professor. When professors ban them, they are not treating us like children; rather, they are recognizing a barrier to effective learning and taking measures to break down that barrier. I know I do not have the self-control to stay off blitz for an entire class, and from what I can tell looking around my various classes, not many of us do.
