Thanassis Cambanis

[Published in Medium.]

The first time I told a group of graduate students that laptops and cell phones were forbidden in my classroom, the outcry was instantaneous. Why was I acting like such an old fogey? It was a seminar about war writing, in a wired classroom in the Internet age. To further confuse things, I am a technophile and was not that much older than my students at the time. I didn’t look like an enemy from the other side of the digital divide — so why the cruelty and ignorance?

By the end of the war-writing course, no one was complaining about the phone and laptop ban. Technology, like everything, has its place, and a good educator (or a good anything) is always open to the right tools at the right time. When we conducted Skype interviews with faraway subjects in Gaza or Iraq, we used a laptop and projector. Out of the classroom, much of the research and collaborative work occurred online, and when needed, students were welcome in the classroom to use their devices for presentations or to look up something relevant.

In this particular classroom, I was trying to teach a specific kind of thinking and writing, which benefitted from a technology-sterile environment. We were collaborating to understand the architecture of powerful stories, the process of gathering narrative strands and information in the fog of war, and what each individual needs to do to transcend assumptions and approach their own voice as a writer. These were intellectually intense and intimate group discussions. The learning that took place required trust and a sense of community that in this case was in part abetted by the act of putting aside our devices for the duration of our meetings.

I’m open to the possibility that in some classroom environments, screens might add something. In a large lecture class with hundreds of students, a shared Twitter handle might foster participation and connection. I’m not sure. But I figure my challenge as a teacher (or a conversationalist for that matter) is to be interesting. If I fail, if I am boring, nothing will change that: not a common hashtag, not PowerPoint slides crisscrossed by an animated Tintin, not a simultaneous online dialogue.

Fans of technology in the classroom, like Michael Oman-Reagan, often cite efficiency; note-taking is quicker, and so is access to online databases and other enriching resources. That’s true, but it’s not always an advantage to be able to jump down a rabbit hole, even a fascinating one; back in the “old” days classes didn’t instantly consult the encyclopedia sitting on a shelf in the back of the room.

Saving time doesn’t necessarily mean better learning or information processing. Many of us long knew anecdotally what science has increasingly made clear: humans aren’t capable of multi-tasking — instead, they just shift rapidly and sequentially between different tasks, degrading their focus on all of them. Even when I’m teaching, I momentarily lose focus if I see an alert for an important new email or a particularly juicy news item.

When I’m teaching, the goal is to communicate. I need the attention of my students with as few distractions as possible. Once I have their attention, it’s up to me to hold and engage it.

In small seminar courses, I found the quality of interaction increased consistently the less screen time we had. It’s not that different from the rest of my life. When I’m writing or researching on my computer, I hate to be interrupted. And conversely, while I love staying in touch with friends and sources around the world through instant messaging platforms, when they ping me while I’m walking somewhere I find myself either bumping into things or missing key parts of the exchange. Satisfaction in my marriage grows when my spouse and I maintain a border between our digital and flesh-and-blood “communications platforms.” When I’m forced to use my laptop during an interview, I find the quality of the conversation always suffers, because of the lost eye contact and imperceptible shift of the center of gravity to the glowing screen.

There are some decent arguments to be made for technology, and some of them point to rare occasions or exceptions when the classroom door ought to be opened to technology. But all too often one encounters fatuous whining. You need Evernote to write your thesis? That’s great, you’re welcome to it. But you don’t need to input our in-class conversation directly onto your laptop. Similarly, it’s hard to take seriously someone who compares the need for laptops in a lecture class to eyeglasses, or banning laptops to the medieval practice of tying up left-handed people because they carry the mark of the devil.

At Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, I spent three hours a week with my seminar students. They had plenty of time outside of class to create stickies to remember tasks, organize book-length projects on Scrivener, or to partake in any of the plethora of everyday technological wonders on which all of us rely. No one says don’t use these things. But why the drama when someone requires you to wait an hour before you do?

A smart, adaptable and resourceful person in today’s world ought to know how to draw on the vast resources of the wired world, amplifying their intellectual power through digital tools and online resources. She also ought to know how to thrive when those tools are out of reach. Anyone who argues that it’s always better to incorporate digital tools into a classroom setting (or any other human interaction, for that matter), is as much a fool and absolutist as the technophobe fogey who never wants to see a laptop or phone.

Technology fetishists sometimes get confused when someone asks them to put away their phone or shut their laptop. They mistake their comfort with technology with a right — specifically, a misguided, nonexistent right to use their technology whenever they want and however they want.

Here’s where the techno-evangelists really lose perspective. They seem to think that their online access, and their gadget comfort zone, is a God-given entitlement of which they must not be deprived for an instant. And while it’s not so with every teacher or in every classroom, that’s another learning experience that I was delighted to give my students: the opportunity to be bored without recourse to the dopamine-squirt of seven-second feeds.

There’s a whole world of ways to tune out, and while I’m glad today that some of them involve the information and interactions on my phone screen, I’m glad that just as many involve staring out a window, or at a point just beside a speaker’s head, or simply and honestly falling asleep. I don’t begrudge students who pass out or let their minds drift, although their class participation grade would suffer; and I certainly didn’t mind if my students, who were after all adults, popped out of the classroom to take a phone call or deal with an important email.

My responsibility as a teacher was to stimulate and engage my students. If I failed to do that, they were welcome not to take my class, or to turn their thoughts elsewhere. Nothing about the digital age, however, says I have compete hand-to-hand with a screen connected to the Internet. There are plenty of things I can do on my computer or phone that, in the moment, would beat out the real world. My screen life might even be more engaging than a class full of students I’m supposed to be teaching, or a lout I’m interviewing, or a street riot I’m trying to navigate. Time and again, though, I make the choice to disconnect from my devices for a spell and engage with something else — even when that something disappoints, tires, or simply makes demands of my mind.

Any teacher who asks their students to do the same thing for an hour or a school day isn’t a luddite shunning the marvels of a technologically-enabled classroom. They’re a human being, and they’re doing those students a favor.Those who panic shrilly at the prospect of an entire class period without their devices might find that learning and living without a computer for an hour or two at a time can be quite a thrill. And when it’s not, being bored without a screen has its benefits too.