Students are marked by ownership.

Everystudent? Laptop, cellphone, pencil. Prepared.

You are a student who has two classes back-to-back, half-the-campus apart on a MWF schedule. Panting, you arrive to your composition class one minute before class begins. Slouched in your desk, you unpack your laptop, place it on your half-size desktop, and press the power button. One minute and thirty seconds into the start-up routine, the instructor finishes roll call. Two minutes into the start-up routine, the instructor directs you to spend five minutes freewriting in the class’s online discussion board about the next essay assignment. Three minutes and thirty seconds into the start-up routine, the Microsoft gong rings out, announcing to all that you are finally logged in. Four minutes and fifteen seconds after you pressed the power button you are online. You now have two minutes and forty-five seconds to freewrite, if you can manage to stop silently cursing your laptop for being so slow.

I first noticed this phenomenon when my professor interrupted my apology for my computer’s slow performance during his office hours. While it is not my fault that my computer’s start-up time from off to running is now an interminable six minutes, I certainly felt like I should attempt to make up for wasting his time on something as mundane as an overloaded processor.

Then, I began to notice the same behavior among my students. First-year students with the low-end model were visibly frustrated when other first-year students with the high-end model were beating them, so to speak; upperclassmen who had purchased the low-end model three computer-generations prior to the first-year students were visibly angered that first-year students were beating them. One student even made a special appointment with me to discuss the slow-load time of her low-end laptop, and she was careful to explain that she had gotten her computer by applying for a university-sponsored grant—as if her need for the grant too needed an apology. Another student dropped by my office to explain that she would need permission to use a power outlet during class (which is against my course policies in order to be fair to all students) because she could not afford to buy the $300 replacement battery that was not covered by her computer insurance or the service agreement. Already marked by race, gender, class, age, able-bodiedness, and region-of-origin among a myriad other differences, students need not also be marked by the functionality of their laptops.

In situations where the progression of the class depends on students’ timeliness and their laptops’ performances, an instructor faces two competing, contradictory priorities:

1. follow a lesson plan that builds sequentially and
2. attend to the various needs of students.

One consequence of this competition of priorities is a nonproductive emotional response; it is easy to be annoyed (with students? with technology? with change?) when students arrive one minute after the start of class and end up five-and-a-half minutes behind. A second consequence of this competition of priorities is the additional complexity to the instructor’s task. How do you keep the users of fast-laptops from distracting themselves while the users of slow-laptops catch up? The following strategies can ameliorate some of this tension:

(1) Create a moving train routine. Post the day’s agenda before class begins. Make the first 5-7 minutes of class time dependent on a projection from the instructor’s laptop or make it technology-free. Make the second activity dependent on student laptop use. Follow this routine for a couple of days in a row, and students (on-time and tardy) will begin to power-up their laptops without delay. If students know that class will start without them and that it will hardly slow down for them to catch up, most of them will want to be onboard.

(2) Pare down the start-up routine. The automatic launching of programs (e.g., chat programs), automatic searching for network availability, and automatic log-ins are usually inconvenient in a wireless classroom. I’ve found that manually connecting to the wireless network after the computer is running is much faster and more reliable.

(3) Teach students to use Standby or Hibernate. Instead of choosing Shut Down before they pack their laptops for class, ask students to choose Standby. Hibernate is another good option if the time between packing the laptop and unpacking it for class is more than one hour. In both cases, the computer will use minimum battery power and will resume much more quickly.

(4) Change your language. Instead of saying “Ok, who’s not ready to go on?,” say “Ok, whose computer is not ready to go on?” Be sensitive to linguistic shortcuts that fuse computer and person.

(5) Seize teaching moments. If a student apologizes for his/her computer, engage the conversation. Talk about cyborg politics. Talk about the computing policy. Talk about ways of alleviating discomfort due to differences among laptop models. Talk about system management—disk cleanup and defragmentation. You’ll be surprised what you learn.