Originally published April 8, 2011 at midnight, updated April 8, 2011 at midnight
Have you ever been sitting in class, minding your own business, when all of the sudden your professor rudely interrupts your Facebook chat to call you out for not paying attention?
You were probably totally embarrassed, spending the remainder of the class period stewing with anger over the tremendous atrocity your professor committed upon your innocent and now-blushing visage. Perhaps you contemplated revenge, wondering what crime you could possibly have professor Jerkyjerk arrested for.
Turns out the answer is simple: assault!
Last week, Frank Rybicki of Valdosta State University was arrested for closing a laptop on the hands of a student who evidently was a notorious class-time Web surfer. The student pressed assault charges, and Rybicki was suspended. For closing a student’s laptop. If that seems stupid and unfair, it’s because it’s really stupid and really, really unfair.
This whole situation is basically David Mamet’s controversial play “Oleanna,” except with all the trenchant psychosexual drama replaced by a real-life Twitter feud.
Now, I’m of the belief that draconian laptop policies are counterproductive. Personally, I’m far more likely to be distracted with a pen and a paper — with their sweet promises of infinite fantastical doodles beckoning me to pay no attention to the infodrone buzzing endlessly in front of the classroom — than by my computer, where I can only check Facebook and Gmail so many times before I’m bored enough to actually start listening to the professor.
Also, using a laptop can radically improve my learning experience, allowing me to produce legible notes (my handwritten notes are often indecipherable, even to me) and augment the lecture or discussion by providing me with in-depth Wikipedia pages about virtually anything the professor mentions.
However, I also believe that laptops are often misused and abused by lazy students who seem to believe that they can acquire information simply by being in a classroom, and that their attention can be dedicated to Tetris while said information floats through their ears and sticks to their brains.
Those students are fairly easy to spot, and any professor who is trying to impart upon his or her students the wondrous gift of knowledge is completely right to be irritated by their zombie-like presence.
It’s another question entirely whether it’s really worth it to call these students out in front of the whole class. If professors felt the need to confront every inconsiderate student for his or her jackassery, the syllabus of every course would simply read: “The entirety of each class will consist of me confronting every inconsiderate student for his or her jackassery. The final exam will be cumulative.”
And that jackassery, annoying though it may be to the professor, is usually not nearly as disruptive as the professor’s response to it. It usually brings the class to a screeching halt, and the rest of the lecture is so fraught with awkward tension that uncomfortable students usually find themselves wishing they hadn’t been paying attention.
The key, I think, is to be covert in your distractedness. There’s a guy in one of my classes who spends virtually the entire time looking at collegehumor.com. But he also frequently contributes to the discussion, and more than that, he actually makes pretty good points. It’s really quite impressive.
If we could all become master multi-taskers, then we’d have no need for frivolous assault charges. Can’t we all just get along and at least pretend to pay attention in class?
— Nichols is a senior in creative writing from Stilwell.
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