Campfire Tip #8: Pencils are the Best Technology
Sometimes, I get a piece of student writing that sounds a little off. No misspellings, perfect punctuation, stays on topic—but something doesn’t seem quite right. No matter where I look amidst the precise diction and correct clauses, I can’t find the student’s voice. That’s when, with a sinking heart, I run the piece through a plagiarism or AI checker and, if I’m unlucky, find a match to another online source.
This is one of the most disheartening moments as a teacher. In every educator’s soul is a hope that their students will come to love their subject as much as they do, that they will grow curious about the world and strive to learn more about it. But when students plagiarize and use AI, the teacher’s hopes are dashed. Plagiarism values product over process, which completely misses the point of education. Shortcuts lead to temporary ease at the expense of long-term progress.
That’s one of the reasons I find AI use among children to be so menacing, especially among elementary schoolers. Whereas the point of writing is to express one’s BIG ideas, to give shape to the abstractions of the psyche, shortcuts make that impossible. When writers use AI and plagiarize, they express other people’s big ideas, handicapping their own potential. How can we grow our own humanity if we steal other people’s? And how can we think up big ideas if we don’t really think at all?
It probably doesn’t come as a surprise that students who use ChatGPT to write essays experience less neural activity when completing assignments—but I found it fascinating that even using the internet in an academically honest way decreases neural activity, as illustrated in this study from MIT. Relying solely on one’s own brain produces the highest levels of neural activity while writing. And with the highest levels of neural activity comes deep learning,
Here’s where pencils come in.
While not a perfect solution, writing by hand limits the temptation students feel to look up answers online or generate them through AI. Whereas typing up an essay on Google Docs comes with an alluring internet browser right next door, practically begging reluctant students to take the easy way out, a paper and pencil leave a student stranded with their thoughts, and their thoughts only.
That’s where the magic of writing happens. When one’s thoughts have the chance to percolate, to coalesce, into something new, unique, and bold.
So what better way to write than pick up a pencil? And, remember, not all pencils are created equal! Click through to The Well Appointed Desk to discover some of the top rated favorites.
~Claire S.