I am very fond of my laptop computer. Before setting foot in my first ISU class, I took out a sizable student loan and purchased the laptop most capable of satisfying my technological needs and desires. Modern word processing and a wireless Internet connection have aided me greatly in researching and writing papers from any location. PowerPoint, as many of you know, is a fantastic resource for transforming poorly researched presentations into convincing illusions of professionalism. And, of course, there is also a myriad of delightful programs that have no pertinence to school whatsoever – ranging from the relatively benign, such as iTunes, to the quintessentially pernicious, such as World of Warcraft.

But let us set those extraneous functions of our robots aside for the moment and reflect upon how we justified purchasing these devices in the first place: to help us in college. Admittedly, our campus is richly furnished with modern, reliable machines, but one cannot rely upon a console to be unoccupied in a moment of crisis, e.g. when a forgotten paper is due in three hours. Furthermore, libraries do not always offer an atmosphere conducive to productivity – sometimes, it seems, people gather in them to procrastinate socially – so the ability to work off-campus can be critical. And finally, having a laptop at one’s immediate disposal does away with the inconvenience of marching through subzero temperatures and fierce precipitation in order to complete an assignment.

But why we do we drag our laptops to class with us? Seldom do we require them on campus, due to the aforementioned abundance of computers, for which Iowa State liberally charges us each semester. Most classrooms, at least most classrooms I have been in, do not have adequate desktop space for anything larger than a 13-inch MacBook or one of those ridiculous, purse-sized PCs. Even when desktop space is not so scarce, these sophisticated, little machines of ours wind up performing a function better served by a notebook and a pen.

Sure, it could be argued that sometimes, since typing is faster than writing, a laptop is the superior note-taking device, but it is rarely a dominant strategy to produce gigantic tomes of notes for a given class. Much of the time, jotting down a short phrase or list gets the job done. Besides, if you rely upon your laptop for note taking, what do you do when the temperature is low enough to damage your LCD screen on the way to class? Are you really going to want to transport that expensive, fragile machine in your backpack when it is pouring rain?

I have sat in the back of classrooms often enough to know what you are actually doing on your laptop. Nine times out of ten, you are online. Whether you are playing poker, cracking out on Facebook or just idly surfing, your mind is elsewhere. I am not the only one who notices –your professor does not need to see your screen to know that you are present in body only.

Then again, I do not care if you waste your time in class, and it is possible that your professor does not care either. It is a quandary, though, why a person would spend such sizable quantities of time and money on an education, only to ignore it. Maybe you do not mean to ignore your classes, maybe the temptation to frolic on the Internet is simply too strong to resist after 35 minutes of a lecture. Maybe that darling laptop of yours, though otherwise a loyal ally, is actually an enemy once you take it into a classroom?