The person you're replying to never said anything like it, they said it made distraction worse. You're arguing in bad faith.

“Most importantly though, they were a HUGE distraction”

Yes. A huge distraction. Notice the adjective, indicating magnitude.

Where did they say laptops introduced the concept of distraction to school?

Have you ever heard of the term sarcasm? Maybe it was left out of the books you read in school.

Sarcasm is use of language, potentially caustic, potentially ironic or humorous, to mock someone or something, e.g. if I were to respond to your comment with "What a witty and clever response that totally adds value to the conversation".

What you did was reiterate the same point that @caldarons had already made themselves in the paragraph immediately following the one you are now quoting.

Also, it's hypocritical to mock @caldarons for your failure to understand what they wrote, while also blaming the people who reply to you for not understanding what you write.

I recall of epic battles with pens turned into blowguns. Making lessons interesting is a lost art, and uninterested pupils will always find a way to distract themselves with what they have at hand, laptops or not.

Thank you for picking up on my point instead of assuming a straw man argument!

That’s a straw man. Nobody said that there were no distractions in classrooms before laptops, just that they made it orders of magnitude worse. Which they did.

Do we ban paper because kids can ball it up and throw it?