Can anyone tell me how to disable Steam so that I can play Skyrum on my laptop while not connected to the internet. I also don't like to have it monitoring every thing I do on my computer while playing Skyrum or not. The only good reason to even have it on my computer, that I can see, is to get upgrades or mods. But I can sign on when I want those and forget it at other times.

Please someone help.....

Run Steam in offline mode.

You can't run Skyrim without Steam, but as Alecto points out you can set Steam to "offline" mode when you don't want it connecting to the internet.