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Ah, back to school. As a longtime urban high school educator, I experience both happy anticipation and dread. I love the kids; they’re the best part. After years in the field, I still get excited about books, teaching students how to analyze, think and write, and how to hold a discussion when you intellectually disagree with someone but still respect them. A seemingly lost art among politicians. However, with the excitement of a new year, I also face ever-growing class sizes, increased workload, falling literacy rates and a public perception that teachers aren’t doing a good enough job. Artificial intelligence, we are told, will solve everything! It will create assignments, grade student essays and teach your students better than you, a mere human being, ever could. Computer learning is the future!
However, I choose a different tactic. I will go old school this year by ditching computers and having my students read real books and then process their thinking by writing with paper and pencil. Literacy rates, as measured by the reading portion of the MCA exams (Minnesota Comprehensive Assessment) administered in schools, have dropped precipitously since computers entered the classroom several decades ago. Teachers who have been around that long will tell you that student attention span and stamina have nose-dived since they appeared. We have nothing to lose by ditching computers and returning to paper-and-pencil learning, and everything to gain.
The key to better literacy lies in increasing student stamina through sustained reading practice, just like weightlifting, adding a bit at a time until strength is maximized. The more silent reading time we can provide inside the school day, the stronger our students will get. The more real books we use, the better students will comprehend and recall what they have read. Students need to read entire books, not excerpts or articles. They need to infer, predict and analyze; these skills learned through sustained reading are also skills they carry with them through life. Granted, there are students with disabilities who need special interventions and they will get them, but the majority need simple practice. A low-tech classroom can provide that.
Writing, a crucial aspect of both literacy and higher-level thinking, also requires repeated, sustained practice. However, because of the siren call of the internet, students who cannot concentrate on the learning task at hand often turn to AI to do the work for them. Online gaming, social media sites and short video clips teach them nothing about sustained intellectual effort. This results in students who will neither spend the time to figure out the meaning behind a tough piece of topic, or don’t have the training and practice to critically think and organize their thoughts. They let the internet do it for them. That’s why they’re struggling.
Computers first started entering my classrooms in the early 2000s. At the time, I was employed by a wealthy suburban high school with a computer lab that teachers could schedule for a class period and bring students down to research and write papers. In this early setup, a teacher had a control computer, showing what was on all the screens of her students. If there was inappropriate content or any off-task behavior, with a simple click of a key, the teacher could lock the student’s computer and have them continue with paper and pencil work. Brilliant. I’d give anything to have that back today.
With the onset of COVID and remote learning in 2020, many school districts were forced to go to one-on-one policies, supplying each student with a personal computer device and ensuring they had internet access. This was a big push and the feds backed it up with generous monies to make it happen. Here is where we lost our kids. I recall teaching online classes with five or six actual students present, out of 35. Of course, more than five or six were signed in, but they placed stickers over their laptop cameras so I couldn’t see if they were actually there or paying attention. Sometimes the sticker would fall off and I could see a sleeping body or an empty chair. Students who blocked their cameras rarely responded to questions or participated in any way. Learning was scant.