I am fully aware that everyone and their children, .. and their children’s children has a smart phone, tablet, computer, laptop, earbuds, headphones, smart watch and a portable toaster to make premade grilled cheese and heat up Crustables on the way to class.

Now in general, the only devices that I have cause for concern within a standard class room is your phone and your laptop. In the past I have tried to restrict phone use and it felt as if every single day I spent 5 minutes talking about it which is a waste of time and that means all the students who were “behaving” were being short changed on lectures by receiving less example problems.

Now you may ask, “What’s the big deal?” Well first off, let’s not split hairs, there is a bit of disrespect in the action. This may be dating myself but back in my day I was in an Aerodynamics Course taught by Dr. Jankowski who was an emeritus professor (i.e. he retired, and they brought him back in to take the class. The guy was a bit of a hard ass, but I do think he wanted us to learn. He tore us up on homework but took the time to identify what was wrong. And here comes the pretentious student who sat in the front right, crossed his legs, sat back and opened a big newspaper and started reading, (By the way, a newspaper was a method of communicating the news to the public wherein trained journalists would write articles in which editors would verify the accuracy of those arcticles, copy editors would proof read and then they would all be put together in a nice organized fashion, printed out, folded up and delivered to your house or be purchasable from a stand on the side of the road or a grocery store. It’s similar to bloggers except that bloggers and the general online article writers retain no professional integrity). Dr. Jankowski gave it a moment when class started to see if he was going to put it away, when a few minutes passed, he walked over, pulled it from his hands and kicked him out of the class. None of us were shocked because all of us, whether we liked Dr. Jankowski or not, saw it as extremely disrespectful and that it called for das’ boot!

Now I have relatively tough skin. So this doesn’t bother me AS much as it may some, even if it is a a true slap in the face to my profession / dedication / work ethic etc… However, what I DO take issue with, is disrupting the rest of the class. You may not realize this, but we are intelligently barely above a smart dog. And evolutionarily (or God given) when shiny things flash in our periphery, we turn and say “Squirrel?!?!”. Then we are forced to return our attention to lecture and try to mentally get caught up to speed to take notes. This my young Padawan’s IS a distraction.

For that alone I do not want smart phones or laptop / tablets in my course. However, as is the case for ALL laws in our country, it’s one thing to have a law, it is quite another to be enable to enforce it, i.e. Seatbelt Laws, using cell phones while driving, etc… So my compromise is this. If you are going to be on your phone or laptop / tablet, be in the back of the class. This way you will not be disturbing your class mates with the colorful images projected in their peripheral view.

The exception to this is those students who are using it properly for notes. i.e. it is flat, on the desk just like a notebook would be thus it is not flashing images back at students, but instead flashing it up for the eye in the sky to watch. Make sure to watch out for the pitboss.