At the beginning of 2010, just as I was finishing the Ninth Grade, my school announced that they were going make the switch to being a laptop school. This meant that at the beginning of the next academic year, every student was going to be given a fully loaded Macbook. Given that I attended an elite all boys private school in Toronto, their move to keep up technologically with the New England prep schools, all who were making very similar transitions, wasn’t at all surprising. The political motivations behind their decision, however, seemed very inconsequential to me at the time. Because I was almost finished riding my three year old Mac into the ground, the thought of a new Macbook Pro almost sent me into spins. That having been said now that I’ve graduated, I don’t necessarily think that laptops are the best tool for preparing students for college.

While computers are extremely helpful for performing certain task, in my school, they were adopted as an educational tool so quickly and completely that they weren’t used appropriately or efficiently. Even most teachers were hesitant to accept computers into their classrooms in fear of having to face twenty glossy eyed students who were enthralled with their ‘notes’. Although laptops do allow students to access great amounts of material online, store thousands of pages of notes, and draft essays with ease, they aren’t great at preforming simple, necessary tasks.

For starters, because laptops require us to type opposed to write our notes, student miss out on the benefit of memorizing content through physically writing that content down. Furthermore, many word processing documents can’t compare to archaic combination of pen and paper in terms of allowing students to link ideas, mind map, or just jot down asides. Because paper is such a flexible medium, it works better in many situations where the physical limitations of computers are too inflexible to be useful.

Throughout high school, it seemed like everything we did was justified with the idea that it would help us in succeed in college and so when I arrived at Middlebury and three out of my four professors didn’t allow us to use laptops in class, I was shocked. Although I like writing my notes on paper, I think there is a major gap in the expectation of technology in education and the reality. Don’t get me wrong, I love my laptop and I think computers are wonderful but sometimes I think that by always trying to stay ahead of the game, we aren’t able to do what’s best for us now.