Opinion | I’m ditching computers in my public school classroom this year

Opinion editor’s note: Strib Voices publishes a mix of guest commentaries online and in print each day. To contribute, click here.

•••

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.

During this time, I also tried to assign readings electronically. In theory, having readings on the computer is a fast, efficient and cheap way to share materials. Schools districts love this, because online readings don’t require storage space and are much cheaper than real books. However, we know that both comprehension and recall are much lower on computer-read material than those which are printed on paper. We don’t know why. It just is. It’s no surprise that MCA reading scores plummeted.

Reading and writing usually go hand in hand. If you get better at one, you get better at the other. To teach writing, AI options are everywhere. Students really struggle with finding the main idea behind concepts and writing it into a thesis statement. AI will do that for them! Another difficult part of writing is organizing your thinking into the main points and then expounding upon them. AI will do that for you too! Educators are encouraged to teach students how to use AI to help their writing, the thought being if you can’t beat them, join them.

Now, I realize that the five-paragraph essay is not something that students will use later on in life. However, the lessons it teaches in clarity of thinking, summarization and defending a position are important life skills. It requires hard, rich and clear thinking. Things we call critical thinking. Of course it’s hard — everything worthwhile is hard. When we use AI to teach writing, the computer produces the thinking by creating the thesis statement and outline of subtopics. All the student needs to supply are the sentences. That’s why I won’t be using computers to teach writing. Additionally, for most writing, I won’t even allow the computers to be turned on. Showing your thinking on paper is required. Most writing will be completed in the classroom. I’d rather that a student get the thesis statement wrong five times and then finally get it right, with the accompanying intellectual growth and sense of worth, than have AI write the thesis for them.

Computer skills are important; I am not discounting that. However, students will spend hours on computers in other classes and outside of school. For one, brief hour each day, in the English classroom, my students will interact with paper, using real books, loose-leaf paper and pens. And they will grow and learn.