Introducing Course Correction
A new series about what Big Tech is doing to education and how to push back against it
Hello, long-time readers! I am back after a lengthy hiatus with a new series to share my thoughts on how, as an educator, I’m trying to rise to this crazy cultural moment. I know that many of you signed up for this Substack to read about art and creativity, and so this topic may not interest you. I totally understand. You can adjust your subscription settings to stop receiving posts from the section of my Substack called “Course Correction.” For updates from my art practice, you can subscribe to my once-monthly traditional newsletter. Now, on to today’s musings!
This year is my twenty-fourth as a high school English teacher (twenty-fifth if you could my internship year in grad school). In the quarter of a century I’ve stood at the front of a classroom imparting wisdom on such subjects as the Shakespearean Sonnet, the correct punctuation of appositive phrases, and the unreliable narrator in twentieth century literature, the conditions under which I labor have experienced a radical transformation. The content is the same, but very little else is.
Picture me at twenty-three years old, looking more than a little like Velma from Scooby Doo, and with her know-it-all tendencies, too. I taught in classrooms with chalkboards—actual chalkboards with dusty chalk and erasers you could clap to produce clouds of dust—teaching from massive textbooks that I lugged from room to room, as I didn’t have a classroom of my own.
If I wanted to use a PowerPoint presentation, I had to sign out a projector on a cart and roll it down the hall to my room. If I wanted to show a movie, I had to sign out a TV with a DVD and VHS player on a cart and roll it down the hall to my room. When I taught grammar, I used a transparency projector. While I had a school-issued laptop, very few students had laptops, and those who did were typically computer nerds and gamers. To access the internet, I had to connect with an ethernet cable. If I wanted students to type essays, I signed out a computer lab and took my classes there to write essays on desktop machines.
Each day, I wrote the homework on the chalkboard and told students to write it down in their agenda books, which they were required to buy with their textbooks and gym uniforms and combination locks. Teachers had static webpages for their classes, created in Microsoft Publisher and uploaded via FTP servers. We were light years away from “learning management systems,” aka student portals. I certainly did not update the homework there daily.
Other things that did not exist in 2002:
Smartphones and tablets
Facebook / Instagram / TikTok
YouTube / Netflix
Wireless earbuds (like Airpods) and smartwatches
Slowly at first, and then all of sudden, things changed. During a building renovation, the chalkboards were replaced with whiteboards and every classroom got a ceiling-mounted computer projector. This was, by and large, a welcome update, a nice bit of modernization. Then came the wifi. No more need to be tethered to the wall for internet connection, and, oh, yeah, students could access the wifi, too, so they could bring their laptops and access the world of knowledge available online.
And right around this moment is when Big Tech started its insidious creep into the classroom. We moved away from Microsoft Office Suite and toward Google Education. We ditched our ragtag static websites for Blackbaud’s learning management portal. My daily workflow changed, little by little, so gradually that I hardly noticed it. I was posting the homework on the board, and saying it out loud, and posting it in the portal. Instead of just projecting my slides, I was also posting them in online topics pages. Instead of just answering emails from students, parents, and colleagues, now I was answering emails and portal messages. But these were small things and routines in my classroom generally proceeded in the same way they had for nearly two decades.
Then our textbooks went out of print and the replacements were dumbed down books that relied in shorter and shorter excerpts from the literature in thematic units that did little to provide essential context, or by digital textbooks delivered through publishers’ e-learning platforms.
And then COVID. The shift into a fully digital environment. Every single routine completely upended, and not just for the spring of the 2019-2020 school year, but for the entire 2020-2021 school year, and beyond.
I did so much work moving my assignments and assessments online during that strange time, so even when school returned to “normal,” I decided to continue being a tech-forward teacher. I had always been willing to experiment with technology in my classroom from having students make wikis in the early 2000s to doing a video projects in the early 2010s when smartphones became ubiquitous. I had always seen technology as a way to add novelty and enhance skills development, but after COVID, technology wasn’t an enhancement, it was a constant.
In many ways, the digital environment made my life easier. For instance, once I had done the work to set up online assessments, the objective portions graded themselves and even appeared in the online Gradebook with the click of a button. Ah, the labor-saving. Essays collected online meant no folders of paper to lug around and no miserable handwriting to read. No hours fighting with the photocopier and its endless paper jams and empty toner cartridges. Win, win, win.
What I couldn’t see at the time were the many costs of this shift, even before we factor in the public release of large language model AI in 2022, which, of course, changed everything. But I see the costs now. I see them, and I’ve made a hard swerve back into the land of analog. Paper assessments, handwritten essays, teaching and learning without any screens between us. To prevent the rampant cheating AI enables, yes, but also because when we rely on the bells and whistles of digital learning tools in the name of increasing engagement, we are actually replacing thinking with paradoxically passive stimulation that looks like productivity but, for most students1, does not yield real learning. Learning in a digital environment decreases critical thinking, erodes attention span, diminishes persistence, and leads to poorer outcomes.
Simply, what I’ve come to believe—based on the anecdotal evidence of my own experience and that of my colleagues, as well as the evidence of much research on the impact of technology in the classroom—is that we must resist the influence of Big Tech on education.
Tech companies don’t care about education. They care about profits. They care about creating the consumers of the future. They cannot be trusted with something as valuable as the intellectual, moral, and personal development of children. Google and Apple raced to get Chromebooks and iPads into classrooms not because they could improve educational outcomes (and we know that educational outcomes have actually worsened in the years since one-to-one initiatives became common) but because they want to hook kids on their products and thereby create lifelong users like drug dealers in the schoolyard offering out a free sample. The drug in question: Dopamine.
When ChatGPT first launched, I made a prediction about the future of education and I stand it by now several years later:
Wealthy, well-funded schools will move toward smaller class-sizes and more personalized education to leverage students’ intrinsic motivation and ensure they get the skills and content they need. Less affluent and poorly funded schools will move toward larger class-sizes because teachers can use AI to manage their workload and because AI can be a teaching assistant to offer differentiation and tutoring. And in this way, the chasm between the upper and lower classes will grow, because whatever Big Tech tells you, ChatBots do the work human teachers do.
This is not a future I want, so I would very much like my prediction to be wrong, but I am not hopeful.
Still, to paraphrase folk singer Catie Curtis, I can’t change the world, but maybe I can change the world within my reach. And that is why I have changed my approach to teaching again, and it is why I’m writing this series.
If you are a teacher, parent, or just a concerned citizen who wants to think about the way forward in education in our strange time, these posts are for you, and I hope you’ll subscribe, share, and leave a comment.
There are some individuals who can and do learn well in digital contexts. They are self-starters who are driven by intrinsic motivation. They are wonderful and rare, and if they didn’t exist, all teachers everywhere would have to quit this profession because the drudgery of trying daily to convince kids to do things they dislike, do not value, and don’t want to do would kill us.