Yea, I took notes with pen and paper. You can pry my laptop from my cold dead hands.
this post was submitted on 08 Mar 2026
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Sounds like the problem is too many students packed in a room
Counterpoint: If a student doesn't learn to cope with the distraction of having a laptop, they won't be prepared for work environments they'll be dumped into after school.
yes they will. Humans are incredible at adapting.
A person learns better with pencil paper and textbooks. The younger the student is, the more this is true.
It's astonishing that you wrote the counter to your own argument within your argument.
Source: whatever?
Honestly, I had a laptop/convertible tablet throughout my studies, and I definitely would not have wanted to be without it. I could draw directly onto the slides, type if necessary (I can type faster than I can write), and I always knew that if I had that thing along, I had everything I needed - no worrying about which binders to bring along and no breaking my back with heavy backpacks.
And when I did get distracted, it usually wasn't from my computer, but from my phone. Which wasn't always bad, sometimes it was good to keep myself awake - I'd rather be semi distracted but still semi paying attention than fallen asleep.
So tired of people playing games on their laptops in my college courses. I think their should be exceptions for accessibility, but I think 90% of the time its better off for everyone to just use a binder
I played games on my gaming laptop in college because I already knew the course material. My flavor of neurodivergence also makes it easier to listen if I have something visual to focus on, but I was just there to get a paper that said I know what I know. Kinda interesting to me that people are so riled up about what others are doing in class when it's not always disruptive though.
Ah yes, because everyone is like you.
or using social media.
Not a fan of this for a couple of reasons.
- I have poor handwriting, especially if I'm trying to jot down a bunch of stuff for ~1 hour straight. Being able to read your notes later is pretty important.
- Sometimes a lecture or discussion goes over a topic it initially covered 10 minutes earlier. Being able to go up the page and add another line on a word document makes notes far easier to follow than drawing arrows or filling in the margins on a real page.
- A big part of education is learning how to learn -- stuff like paying attention and self-discipline. Today, that includes learning how to manage your interactions with devices.
- I can space out just fine without a computer anyway.
yeah, fuck taking notes by hand. I can't write that fast and it will look like shit.
As someone who was too deaf to hear one professor even when sitting in the front row bc of the acoustics in that room, if there had been a way to read the lecture I would have taken it. That can be done with a printed copy tho, no need for a laptop
If I’d had a laptop in my classroom there’s no way I’d be paying attention to the lecturer.