A ban I can get behind.
Welcome news from the Land of Arbitrary Rules I Love: more and more professors are banning laptops in college classrooms.
This isn’t exactly news — laptop bans show up on many an English department syllabus in my neck of the woods — but it did re-stimulate my amazement at students tapping away on laptops in classes. I sat in on an undergraduate class on Ulysses last year and every day I watched two students pull out their computers and play on Facebook or instant message people for the entire class. That irritated me on three levels:
#1 — I hate distractions of any sort, and people tapping on keyboards is right up there with the sound of apple-chomping when it comes to driving me crazy. It’s even worse when I know the tapping is unrelated to whatever meeting or class I’m in.
#2 — Why come to class at all if you won’t even pretend to pay attention?
#3 — (probably most important) I’m jealous. Do you know how awesome it would have been to have a little laptop or iPhone to play with during boring economics classes? Really damn awesome. Instead, my brain was infected with the type of mid- to late-90s theorizing that got us into this horrible world-wrecking economic mess we’re in today. I’d have given anything to be playing Mafia Wars on Facebook during those lectures, and maybe we’d all be better off if everyone else had been distracted, too. All you jerks who got As in Econ during the 90s: THANKS A LOT. I’ll take my C-average (but A-average in my major, English) self over world-wrecking any day. At least I can sleep at night. In my cardboard box.
Anyway, I banned laptops in my classes solely because of a corollary to Irritation #3: If I couldn’t have one, you can’t either. Because, future students of Professor MoodyTunes who are reading this, I know what you’re doing. I was a bad student, and now I’m a teacher. That’s the worst possible scenario for you because I know how tired/bored/lazy you are, and I know your tricks, and I enjoy arbitrary rules.
And really, isn’t that the best lesson I could possibly teach? Welcome to adulthood, and please grab your List of Arbitrary Rules at the door. Memorize the List for a quiz tomorrow. But be aware that, by tomorrow, the List will be completely different.
P.S. — NO. There is no extra credit. Never. In fact, I’ll lower your grade for asking. Don’t even get me started on extra credit because that morphs into entitlement issues and I’m not smart enough to express my feelings on that.
Posted: March 10th, 2010 under Ain't That America, Infotainment, MFA, Tech.
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