Paper beats pixels for formula-heavy courses
I gave the tablet a genuine two-semester trial. Good stylus, low-latency screen, the maths app that straightens your handwriting, searchable notes, unlimited space, no bag weight. Textbook PDFs on the screen are objectively better than the eleven-hundred-page brick. I will concede all of that at the start, because the claim I am making is narrower than paper-vs-screen.
The claim is about derivation work — the hours where you are reworking a proof or a long calculation line by line. There, paper won, and for a reason nobody in the tablet-advert places on the box.
The problem is the rubber
Derivation work is not writing. It is writing, then killing, then re-routing. A line goes wrong six steps in and the whole block below it moves. On paper, killing a line is a single stroke and the eye learns to skip crossed-out text instantly; re-routing is an arrow into the margin. On the tablet, every one of those operations is a tool switch: pen to eraser, eraser to lasso, lasso around the region, wait for the reflow the app does not actually do anyway. I counted once: in a two-hour session, thirty-one tool switches. Each one is half a second and a thought dropped.
The second problem is scale. A long calculation wants a big surface you can stand back from. My tablet screen is one third of an A4 page of usable area at readable size, so a six-line derivation fills the view and I lose the beginning of the argument while writing the end. A3 paper shows the whole thing at once, and the whole thing at once is where the structure becomes visible. This is not nostalgia; it is a window-size problem, and the desk is the cheapest wide monitor there is.
Where the tablet stayed
Lecture capture, papers, diagrams traced from the textbook, and anything I need to send to someone the same day. The split settled itself: input-heavy reading on glass, thinking-with-a-pencil on paper, and I stopped feeling like I was cheating whichever way I went.
The honest caveat: this may be a hands thing and not a universal truth. The one classmate I talked into the tablet trial does her derivations in short blocks and says the search is worth the tool switches. What I would generalise is smaller than my headline — whatever surface you choose, give it an honest term of measurement instead of an opinion, and watch what your hands actually do in the hard hour.