Shantanu Srivatsa and Anamika Veeramani sat nervously, side by side on stage.
Once again, an Indian-American was going to win the Scripps National Spelling Bee. It was just a matter of what word and what time on Friday.
Shantanu, 13, an eighth-grader from West Fargo, N.D., stepped to the microphone first and couldn’t spell “ochidore.”
On the first Sunday in April, 22-year-old Ankit Gupta woke earlier than usual and drove from Stanford University’s leafy campus in Palo Alto, California, to his friend’s place a few blocks away. Gupta and his Stanford mate Akshay Kothari, who is a year elder to him, made it to the old Apple retail store on University Avenue by 7 am.
A generation ago, academia embraced the laptop as the most welcome classroom innovation since the ballpoint pen. But during the past decade, it has evolved into a powerful distraction. … Professors have banned laptops from their classrooms at George Washington University, American University, the College of William and Mary and the University of Virginia, among many others.