The long march of technological progress has radically changed the way we work. What used to take hours in a library, looking through encyclopedias and newspaper archives, can now easily be replaced with a quick internet search.

Yet, while these advancements have become mandatory fare in our lives, and an expectation in the workplace, many professors at Shippensburg University have banned anything more advanced than a clay tablet and chisel in the classroom.

Many seniors have probably noticed the change during their time here. General education classes hand out the syllabus on the first day of class, and somewhere in bold print, there will be a message banning phones and laptops. 

The restriction seems onerous. Students are issued laptops in high school, or earlier, and learn to do their work on them. When students graduate from this institution, they, too, will be headed straight into a tech-dominated workplace. As if to emphasize the point, some companies have already integrated mandatory AI tools that track workers to make sure they are using them in the name of efficiency.

Yet, consistently, Shippensburg University students are being forced to learn via outdated methods. Handwritten notes, math without calculators — as if you are ever going to need to emergently do math without being in reach of a calculator on your phone, watch or computer — it all seems disjointed from the world we live in.

There are multiple angles to look at the tech in classroom conversation. There are a lot of reasons why students dislike blanket tech bans in class. Some people prefer typing their notes, others want to be able to do work for another class. While the latter is not ideal, every teacher wants their class to be your priority, and sometimes there just is not enough time to avoid such multitasking.

There is also an argument to be made that the standard desk in the majority of classrooms can hardly fit a regular-sized notebook, which further pushes students toward laptops. It is also important to note that the vast majority of coursework is online now. Assignments are almost always typed and submitted via D2L, rather than being handwritten or printed out.

However, professors have a reason to not want tech in the classroom. It can be disheartening to teach a subject that you are deeply passionate about just to see your students staring at their screens instead of absorbing the material.

Sometimes, professors just want to be able to deliver their lesson without having to worry that the class is preoccupied with scrolling instead.

Students already pay thousands of dollars to attend classes, if they want to waste their money by watching unrelated things on a laptop screen. The problem there is motivation, and one way to make students be engaged in class is to allow them more freedom to choose the general education classes they wish to take, rather be forced to study topics they have no interest or use for.

The issue of screens in classrooms is complicated. It can be helpful for students in middle and high school to not have access to their phones, so that they can focus on the material. In the college classroom, it does seem ridiculous to police what grown adults do in a class that they pay for. 

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