I agree 100%. As a recovering HS teacher and a former (but would love to return to) college professor, if you’re not there to learn, drop the class. Or better yet, don’t sign up for the class in the first place and let someone who wants to be there take the class.

My classroom: my rules. If you don’t have the decency to pay attention to class, don’t show up. This is entirely within my prerogative. We shame faculty here for goofing off in meetings. And, yes, I have banned computers outright from my lectures because students have abused the privilege. Feel free to now falsely…

The problem with no-brainer notes is that students typing their notes into laptops reduces them to, in so many words, stenographers. They’re not engaging their brains. I teach college, and am confronted by the Wall of Laptops in my classes. Of course, at least half those students are doing Anything But Notetaking…

And, if you’re sitting in the classroom, the fastest, best equation editor is known as Pen and Paper.

If you opt for the better-remembering of handwritten notes, look into various note-taking schemes such as Cornell Notes:

“Even when multitasking is blocked, students who take notes on a computer tend to perform worse than students who take notes by hand, according to a 2014 study by Pam A. Mueller and Daniel M. Oppenheimer. They found that laptop users were basically creating a transcript of the lecture, while those taking notes by hand…