What’s more distracting than noticing your teacher’s fly is undone while they unknowingly continue the entire lecture? Laptops.

The use of laptops shouldn’t be allowed during class. Whether you want to admit it, they’re distracting.

With wireless Internet available in most classrooms, it’s easy to fix a boring lecture with a double-click on that Internet icon. Yet, being distracted in this way is like coming to class and not taking notes. I’ve never understood this. Unless you have some seriously superior brain power and can record an entire lecture on your brain without taking notes, why do you bother coming to class? Laptops are the same. If you’re going to surf Facebook the whole time, why not do it in your sweats at home rather than wasting your time in class?

Distractions from laptops have made some teachers at the University ban students from using them during their classes. Ted Boone, professor of business, said that he did not allow the use of laptops or other electronic devices during his Introduction to Information Systems course. He said that students are too easily distracted by e-mail, text messaging, Web browsing, etc.

Unless the course can directly benefit from the use of computers, all too often “the computer becomes a distraction instead of an enhancement to learning,” he said.

True, there are plenty of other ways besides laptops to be distracted during class. Doodling, doing the SuDoku or daydreaming can all too easily make you tune out your professor’s voice. Yet, eliminating laptops is more important , because, unless you fall asleep and start drooling, at least daydreaming doesn’t distract other students as well.

My most memorable laptop experience was during my first class at the University. It was in Budig 120, the largest lecture hall on campus. The size of the room amazed me so much that I was too nervous to scale the steps to a higher seat. So I sat in the front, in a row with only two seats beside a guy with a laptop on his desk. I don’t remember anything about that class, not because it was more than a year ago, but because the guy beside me spent the entire period shopping for ridiculously large pocketknives on his laptop. Rather than listening to the professor, I spent the whole class in silent fear, wondering if he was going to stab me for having the audacity to sit next to him.

While most students’ experiences probably aren’t quite so dramatic, students can still easily be distracted by what others are viewing on their laptops.

Charles Marsh, professor of journalism, doesn’t ban laptops from his classes, but does ask students who use them to sit at the back of the classroom so as not to distract others. Marsh said he had seen students doing everything from shopping at Nordstrom to watching baseball.When laptop users are doing something to distract other students, “that’s where laptop use crosses the line,” he said.

Computers are important. In fact, sometimes I get fidgety if I’m away from a computer too long. I probably couldn’t go a day without getting on one. I can, however, manage to restrain myself for 50 minutes.

Hudson is a Wichita junior in journalism and business.