Poor Law Students
March 29th, 2006 - 3:38 pm
A professor of law at the University of Memphis has banned laptops from her classroom, and boy are the students upset.
Student Cory Winsett says if he must continue without his laptop, he’ll transfer to another school. Winsett says he won’t be able to keep up if he has to rely on hand-written notes, which he says are incomplete and less organized.
So how did all of us who went to college before the invention of laptop computers manage to keep up? How did we manage to learn anything? Let’s see … we took notes on paper, which we then later organized. We used class syllabuses and textbooks. We even used cassette recorders to record lectures so we could listen to them later for anything we might have missed. Amazingly, many of us were able to study and pass classes using these horribly outdated and inefficient methods. 
If his handwritten notes are incomplete and disorganized, he has no one to blame but himself. He needs to learn how to take better notes. A laptop is not a requirement for achieving a higher education.
4 Responses to “Poor Law Students”
The younger guys, at work, used to tell me I was full of shit when I told them the calculator had a crank on the side of it and we had to use a slide rule to adjust formulas in the lab.
Just goes to show ya.
You’re probably too young to have used a slide rule.
Ha ha! About to surprise you! I did in fact own a slide rule, and I even went to a few student (geek) conferences to test on how well I could use it (never scored better than 50% of the other people, I mean boys — girls were pretty rare). I was pretty dead set on being an engineer until I got distracted by art and music … and realized just how much I hated doing math.
My parents used to joke about walking to school uphill both ways in the freezing rain … no car rides every morning and afternoon for them (related to me whenever I would whine about having to walk to school). I guess my “way back when” story will be that I actually had to take notes on paper and do math without a calculator … after I walked to school uphill both ways in the freezing rain, of course.
All these people so dependent on their tech to get through life better pray that nothing ever happens and they have to use a pencil for something other than chewing on. What the hell would someone like the student quoted do if he found himself without electricity? I imagine his brain would cease functioning, and he would become a brainless blob of quivering, twitching goo. It’s great that technology has provided us with so many ways to be efficient and whatnot, but knowing how to do things the “old way” is important. I’d like to ask him: If you can’t function as a student without your trusty laptop, will you be able to function as a lawyer without it? Shouldn’t you be able to do so?
How’s this for ya? I actually found that taking notes distracted (me) from the lecture. I was a terrible note taker. I think they ought to pass out DVD’s of all the classes so you can go through them as many times as you have to. I guess that would kind of eliminate the need for classes though.
If I had a handheld calculator back in those days, when color TV was as big as a washer and reception looked like a dull colorful blizzard, I would had been kicked out of school for cheating.