TEACHER VOICE: We can’t outpace AI, but we can still teach our students the value of writing

There’s no getting around it — it takes work to teach students how to write. And it takes work for them to do it. It involves knowing which ideas to reject and which to expand upon. It requires summoning a purpose, choosing words that capture the proper tone and reading them out loud. It is […] The post TEACHER VOICE: We can’t outpace AI, but we can still teach our students the value of writing appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Jan 29, 2025 - 02:11

TEACHER VOICE: We can’t outpace AI, but we can still teach our students the value of writing

There’s no getting around it — it takes work to teach students how to write. And it takes work for them to do it.

It involves knowing which ideas to reject and which to expand upon. It requires summoning a purpose, choosing words that capture the proper tone and reading them out loud. It is making the cake not from the box, but from scratch.

When we ask students to write take-home essays about “Hamlet,” they don’t write the best treatises ever conceived on the subject. Indeed, I don’t know if any of my former students have gone on to become literary critics.

But by asking them to take that much time to create something, we are asking them to reach into themselves, to push through discomfort and make something that’s never been made before.

When they emerge on the other side and take pride in their accomplishments, we are all the better for it.

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And that’s why I’m concerned about how teachers are responding to the fear of students cheating with AI. Instead of assigning take-home essays, many are choosing to emphasize day-to-day discussions and student presentations, and then quiz and test. They limit writing to timed, in-class essays; there has even been a return to bluebooks and handwriting.

The downside of so much performance-based thinking is that students are forced to compress their creativity into limited parameters, leaving them less incentive to take risks and less time to make discoveries as they go. Instead, they chase points that match what they think the teacher is looking for. When they hand it in, it’s done.

If the goal is merely to maximize efficiency and accountability, there are some upsides to this pedagogical pivot. But I fear that it undervalues intrinsic learning — the thinking beyond the answers, the questions that form and linger outside the classroom — and you should too.

There are, of course, times when quick and nimble decision-making skills are critical — for quarterbacks and disaster relief coordinators, say.

In one very real sense, it’s important for students to answer questions directly and stay on task, but when we take that approach, we are essentially training our students to mimic the predictive thought patterns of AI.

It’s also now abundantly clear that we need more long-term thinking to address our collective and mounting deficits: How will tariffs actually work? How will home insurance work when cleanup from a single hurricane or wildfire costs $250 billion? And how much is that hurricane or wildfire itself the result of short-term thinking?

Consider the evolution of what began as an in-class essay from one of my empathetic, introverted students about the book “Behold the Dreamers.”

She began with, “Author Imbolo Mbue grew up in Cameroon and moved to the United States. Through this, she has grown mindful of the differences in the female gender role between countries.”

A fine opening gambit, but because she had only 30 or so minutes after she had thought, organized and composed this, she had to scramble through the text to hash out the necessary thumbnails of support.

When I sent the essays back, I offered students the chance to take them home and revise them. (This, by the way, is the best AI-busting technique I’ve found.)

She did, and what came back was amazing: Excerpts from interviews with Mbue, and details about the composition of Cameroon’s parliament (33 percent female) and the proportion of time that women actually spoke during parliament meetings (5 percent).

She had time to delve into the examples that were spurted onto her timed draft, and explore the protagonist’s stages of enlightenment and her unlikely connection with another character who initially seemed quite different.

Even though she had read her essay over and over, the writing was full of discovery. If I hadn’t encouraged a revision, I never would have known these thoughts were in her, and she wouldn’t either.

Because here’s the thing about allowing for longer processing time — the brain can find the heart.

So why are so many teachers doing away with long-form essays? I fear this is just another erosion of integrity, like grade inflation and doing away with SAT requirements for college entry. Instead of changing individual students, it’s easier to change the system. And to many of the students I have spoken with about AI, there’s a resentment about this assumption of distrust.

Coming back and then back again to sustained assignments allows the writer to chip away at the cave. After a crushing defeat on the field, she might better tap into the regret of a character; after listening to a wispy love ballad, he might be more attuned to the pangs of heartbreak the protagonist suffers.

If the writer is allowed to live through different spaces as they compose, they are better able to see the roundness, complexity and humanistic core of a character, or a point of view.

It will take more than long-form high school essays to save the world, but the cognitive endurance they require is one of the few institutional bastions that remain against the all-out melting of the mind into the machine.

When students are accustomed to getting answers so quickly — and used to solutions coming through AI and not their own meandering thoughts — they can find it frustrating to sit down and corral a cogent narrative.

But in my view, this is about the most worthy and sustainable work that they can do.

Tim Donahue teaches high school English at Greenwich Country Day School in Connecticut.

Contact the opinion editor at opinion@hechingerreport.org.

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