Writing Is Thinking

Essay 3.1

Why I Teach Journalism to My High School History Students

December 8, 2017 (earlier version) · Edutopia

Earlier version at Edutopia · Read archived article · Source details

In high school, I struggled to write clear, concise prose. My command of structure was minimal, and I didn’t make effective use of sources to inform my analysis. I also had difficulty differentiating summary from analysis, much to the chagrin of my teachers, who still worked diligently to help me hone my writing.

However much I struggled, only when I found my passion for news reporting did my success in the humanities begin to soar — so much so, in fact, that I now teach journalism to my own history students, hopeful that they too will benefit from the combination.

Take it from Preston Michelson, who recently graduated from Northwestern University with degrees in journalism and political science. He served as founding editor of The Falconer, the student news site of Palmer Trinity School (Palmetto Bay, Florida), where I spent the first six years of my teaching career. I also taught him in yearbook, American History, and United States Government.

Michelson tells me that his experience as a high school journalist allowed him to transfer two tenets of continued success in the college classroom, “clarity and information gathering.” He says, “Clarity is relatively straightforward — writing is toothless without it. The nature of journalism as a sort of public service, writing on behalf of the reader, dictates that writing not be overcrowded or needlessly complicated. To me, this is a great tenet to follow in all kinds of writing, even in the academic realm. Not overcomplicating topics boils information down to its most vital elements.”

Michelson references the necessity of quality research in journalism and in academia. “When I started writing for The Daily Northwestern in college, I was dispatched to cover topics new to me, everything from health care policy to Islamic theory. The role of a journalist is to act as a sort of expert no matter the newness and complexity of the topic, and that calls for doing your homework on every story. I conducted research for my history and political science research papers with much the same intensity.”

Of course, major differences exist between journalism and history. After all, journalism is the first, imperfect draft of history. Whereas reporters work under time constraints to produce the best obtainable version of the truth, historians hold themselves to a higher standard. They spend years conducting detailed research, carefully reconstructing cause and effect for a deeper, more complete rendering of past events.

For another take on the benefits of journalism for history students, I emailed Adam Hochschild, a revered journalist who teaches narrative writing at the University of California, Berkeley, co-founded Mother Jones, and has written eight nonfiction books, including one of my favorites, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa.

A journalist writing for a deadline, he says, often focuses on attributing facts and quotations to a specific source. For example, a news article might read something like, “‘3.7% of the American population has schizophrenia,’ said Joe Doakes of the state Department of Health and Welfare.”

“That’s good enough for tomorrow’s newspaper, but it probably isn’t good enough for a history book,” Hochschild writes. “How were they measuring schizophrenia in the year from which your statistic comes? Did the official or scholar or agency you cite have motive for exaggerating or minimizing the figure? Those are some of the kinds of things a historian has to ask. Similar questions apply to all sorts of other assertions and statistics.”

All distinctions aside, after ten years in the high school classroom, I’m here to report that history students benefit from also studying journalism, as did Nicole Font, who recently graduated with a teaching degree from High Point University. I also taught her in various history and journalism courses at Palmer Trinity.

In high school, Font says, she found it difficult to write clearly and concisely. She would spend hours reworking long-winded prose. “A specific turning point for me as a writer was enrolling in your journalism classes,” she says. “I was immediately challenged to hone my writing and trim unnecessary words that I used to sound ‘interesting’ or ‘more intelligent.’ As a result, I found that my writing — in all subjects — developed so that I was writing for more than just my high school teachers. I could piece together paragraphs and join ideas in a more natural way, which contributed to my success as a writer in high school and college.”

Font’s comments remind me of another conversation I had with Sam Ravina ’17, a former editor-in-chief of The Gator, an award-winning student site which I also advise, who told me that the newsroom helped him succeed at Brimmer and May (Chestnut Hill, MA), where I currently teach. When you learn to write about events with a “piercing objectivity,” Ravina tells me, you can transfer that skill to numerous forms of communications. He believes that journalism is no less fundamental than English or history, and he credits his time in the newsroom with his success in other academic classes.

“Journalism trained me to see the objective ‘point’ in all aspects of the humanities,” says Ravina, who plans to study philosophy at Davidson College (Davidson, North Carolina) in the fall. “In history, I can spot significant causes of events, and interpret a variety of sources to understand both sides of an argument. In English, my writing is astronomically more precise, and I developed a sharper eye for tone and complexity in literature. My leadership experience in the newsroom also transformed my ability to evaluate my own writing, and give and receive feedback to others. I cannot say enough about the extent to which journalism has helped me, and many others, develop the ability to think, reason, and write.”

To hear from someone in academia who straddles both worlds, I reconnected with Michael J. Socolow of the University of Maine, a media historian and one of my favorite journalism professors as an undergraduate at Brandeis University (Waltham, MA). “Journalism and history emphasize similar skills, such as learning how to build credibility by documenting sources and attributing information appropriately, and learning how to argue persuasively,” he wrote to me.

To reinforce those skills, my history students read newspaper and magazine articles — not just to keep them informed about today, which I care about, but also to foster discussion about sources and how journalists use evidence to craft a narrative. Whether analyzing works of history or conducting their own research, my students apply similar levels of scrutiny. Meanwhile, debate over what constitutes “fake news,” as well as how to spot it, encourages young minds to be vigilant about the types of sources they find and cite. As just one example, before they refer to a source, I ask if a New York Times reporter would trust that source. Whatever the response, before proceeding, students must defend their reasoning to me.

In this respect, Font intends to employ a similar strategy in her fifth-grade classroom next year, when she launches her own teaching career. “I recall how you constantly asked students to question where they got information, and how they planned to use it to express their learning,” she says. “You helped me think carefully about what sources should be trusted, especially if I wanted to be taken seriously by anyone who read my writing. I want to impart that crucial lesson to my own, much younger students, as well as introduce them to the news gathering, reporting, and writing process.”

With Font’s final point in mind, I have found that introducing students to journalistic writing also helps them find and engage an audience. Too often, high school teachers (including me) ask that students follow formal, academic structure — a worthwhile endeavor, but not if it precludes introducing history students to different forms of written expression. To address this deficiency, when teaching about Old Hickory, I read aloud several of my favorite passages from American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House, by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jon Meacham. The first line of the opening chapter grabs their attention and leaves them wanting me to continue: “Christmas in 1828 should have been the happiest of seasons at the Hermitage, Jackson’s plantation twelve miles outside Nashville.”

I tell students how much I admire Meacham, a former editor-in-chief of Newsweek, whose work has appeared in the nation’s most respected publications. I recently contacted him, curious whether he thinks academic historians, in the trenches of archival research, could or should learn from how he crafts engaging narratives, which appeal to a wider readership than historical monographs might. “It’s not my place to lecture or speculate on other people’s literary styles,” he says. “If we are writers, we all have different seasons, if you will . . . There’s room for everything.”

Meacham nails what I hope to convey to my students — that even as teachers defend the virtues of the five-paragraph essay, they should also make room in the curriculum for not just narrative writing, but journalistic writing as well. I also want my history students to want to share their work with others, and the idea of sharing academic writing seldom excites them. With that in mind, last fall, capitalizing on their heightened interest in Jackson, I assigned my students a more creative task:

“This is like Andrew Jackson’s victory. This is the people beating the establishment,” Rudy Giuliani, former mayor of New York City, told MSNBC’s Chris Matthews. “And that’s how he [Donald Trump] posited right from the beginning: the people are rising up against a government they find to be dysfunctional. And yes, it’s a defeat for the Democrats, but this is a defeat for some Republicans too.”

In what respects, if any, do similarities exist between President Andrew Jackson and President-elect Donald Trump? What might these parallels reveal about our nation’s future? Or is Giuliani off base here? Either way, please compose a well-written, convincing piece that supports your stance.

All of this leads us back to something else Hochschild told me:

Spending ten years as a magazine editor was hugely useful to me. All the time you are making judgments: Are people going to want to read this article? Why? Why not? How can we make it better? Does it need more scenes, characters, suspense? How can we draw in readers who don’t have a pre-existing interest in the subject? Those are things that a historian always has to think about if you want people to read what you write.

If you’re still not sold on the potential value of teaching journalism to history students, Meacham says, “I see a direct connection between what I learned in journalism and what I’m doing now,” explaining that insofar as he has anything to say in his books, it’s because journalism exposed him to politics and public life at an early age.

For his part, Michelson credits much of his success at Northwestern to his experience in the high school student newsroom. “That’s when I really started to understand the importance of journalism and the universality of it. I felt that in many of my other high school classes, I was taught different ways of approaching research, whereas in journalism, simplicity was key. It was about understanding the story and telling the story, while adding expert analysis where applicable. That’s a blueprint to succeed across the board.”

Essay 3.2

To Teach Effective Writing, Model Effective Writing

June 10, 2014 (earlier publication) · Edutopia

Earlier publication at Edutopia · Read archived article · Source details

When I was a kid, every weekend, my parents would drive me to Loon Mountain in New Hampshire to master the sport of skiing — and downhill racing, in particular. On the chairlift, my instructors would critique the technique of those skiing below us. On the race course, I would spend hours studying and eventually trying to mimic the most experienced racers.

I can’t overstate the importance of effective modeling in helping me become an amazing skier. Effective modeling is also how I learned to write well. I spent equal time and effort actually watching other, more experienced writers write.

In high school, I sat beside terrific teachers and paid close attention as they actively reworked my sentence structure and diction. Just as I absorbed knowledge by watching better skiers, here too, teachers provided effective modeling for me to emulate. I wish to make perfectly clear that they certainly didn’t do my work for me. Together, rather, we worked toward my overall mastery.

Writing for the student paper of Brandeis University, I spent more time watching others write, rewrite, and edit. In fact, during my first year in The Justice newsroom, I did little else than observe production night, which actually started around mid-afternoon and went until the early morning hours of the next day. Years later, I can still hear my more experienced peers calling for punchier prose, tighter paragraphs, and better quotes.

• To teach effective writing, you yourself must be an effective writer. We can’t teach what we don’t know, and when it comes to writing, it’s important to continue honing your craft. If you haven’t engaged in much formal writing since college, you will remain a less effective teacher. No matter what you teach, try starting a blog, writing articles, or short stories. All of those are terrific ways to engage the mind and keep your skills sharp. Reading is important, but reading alone isn’t enough to strengthen your writing skills, or to make you a credible authority in the subject.
• No matter what you teach, share your written work. I always share with my students, and I ask for their feedback and even criticism. In that respect, it’s essential for students to recognize not only your skill, but also that you are interested and engaged in constantly refining a crucial life skill. For one lesson, I even share with students my high school, college, and graduate school essays, and they analyze what I improved upon over time. I’m excited about sharing my work, and that in turn helps get my students excited about doing the same.
• No matter what you teach, produce writing in front of students. When I am teaching about formal introductory paragraphs, for instance, my history students think of a worthy historical question for me to tackle. With the projector on, I then write out the paragraph, sharing my thought process along the way. Students observe how I work and rework my prose, and how I place a premium on concession. They also critique my work, which in turn helps them become more cognizant of not repeating similar mistakes. More still, my admitting my weaknesses helps students become less defensive about their own work, and in turn more open to criticism.
• Create workshop environments, with multiple stations focusing on different aspects of writing. In my history classroom, I appoint a student great at transitions to staff the “transitions” booth, and a student great at topic sentences to staff the “topic sentence” booth. Of their own volition, or with my suggestion, students visit whatever booth fits their needs. As far as instruction goes, this maximizes utility while freeing me to meet one-on-one with the neediest students.
• Urge students to share their work with each other and online. Few writers have ever improved by keeping their work to themselves. As the teacher, I know my opinion holds significant weight. But the same is true of what others think, especially one’s peers. In an increasingly flat, digital age, students must feel comfortable and confident with sharing their work for the whole world to see. In that regard, teachers should help students produce appropriate, high-quality content.
• Most importantly, teachers must do whatever they can to convey the importance and usefulness of mastering effective writing. No matter what craft or profession students wish to pursue, at every turn, I make clear that knowing how to write well will play a significant role in their success. From science, math, engineering, law, history, journalism, to anything else one can think of, the ability to express oneself clearly in writing is absolutely essential. Next year, to help get that point across, I hope to invite various professionals to speak to students about how writing plays a role in their lives.

Essay 3.3

What I Learned about Teaching Writing from the Late, Great William Zinsser

June 6, 2013 (earlier reporting) · Edutopia

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Editorial date note: This interview took place before William Zinsser’s death in 2015; its present-tense descriptions belong to that earlier conversation.

It’s near the end of the school year, and I’m chatting with Preston Michelson ’13, my star journalism student, about the changing nature of writing and reporting.

Michelson, who will attend the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University next year, has just finished his last exam. He celebrates by walking into the Palmer Trinity School newsroom with a printed edition of The New York Times.

In my recent memory, I can’t recall seeing any other 18-year-old read an actual newspaper — certainly not as intently. I chide Michelson for supporting a dying relic, the printed word. It seems strange that such a tech-savvy student would even glance at a newspaper. After all, Michelson epitomizes what I like to call “Journalist 2.0.” He edits video, sound, and photographs, and he even has a strong command of basic website coding.

“But I still like the printed article,” Michelson tells me. “It’s okay to have an appreciation for both print and online journalism.”

I’m taken aback. It takes me a moment to remember that with all of Michelson’s technical skills, none of his other talents compares to his reporting and writing abilities. We spend the next hour discussing the changing nature of writing, and how one should teach journalism for the 21st century.

As we chat, I’m appropriately reminded of an April 28 New York Times piece, “A Writing Coach Becomes a Listener,” about William Zinsser, 90, considered by many to be one of this country’s greatest masters of prose. Zinsser is also author of On Writing Well, among the most lauded and utilized teaching and learning guides.

“Clutter is the disease of American writing,” Zinsser writes. “We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon.”

I reach out to Zinsser, a living legend, for his views on how he adapted to writing for an online audience, and whether the Web adds “pompous frills and meaningless jargon” to the public discourse. First and foremost, Zinsser tells me that technology is not the issue.

“The issue is learn to write,” he says. “Put one sentence after another in good, simple declarative language and get what you want written the way you want to write it. Then find a way to harness it, publish it in whatever technology that exists.”

Zinsser is a self-professed “lifelong child of paper.” For years, he sold pieces to The American Scholar, a prestigious quarterly magazine that ran his work in a print edition. At first, Zinsser balked when he heard from his editors that they wanted him to go online.

Zinsser says, “I thought ‘Oh, God, that’s the kiss of death. I will vanish into some electronic black hole. I don’t even know who’s reading.’ I assumed that nobody of any intelligence was reading out there — it was one vast mess.”

I have long argued in favor of moving print publications online, especially with an increased emphasis on “going green.” I find solace in discovering another supporter in Zinsser.

“I have been impressed by the fact that The American Scholar, like all magazines, now is putting a heavy emphasis on its online presence,” Zinsser says. “That’s their only road to salvation.”

For a man who lived most of his life dependent on paper, Zinsser adapted extremely well to the Internet — so much so, in fact, that he proposed starting his own blog:

I said to the editor, “You’re only a quarterly. That’s not much product.” I said, “How would it be if I wrote you a weekly blog?” I didn’t tell him that I’d never even seen a blog, but I never really had. He said, “Fine.” I began writing this blog, and I wrote it for 80 straight weeks.

Zinsser tells me he wanted to see if he could write for a new medium and continue producing reviews and columns, which he had done so successfully his entire life. He not only succeeded — he excelled.

“We started, and it took me a while to figure out what a good blog should be,” Zinsser says. “It had to be more timely; it had to be tighter. But I learned a lot by doing it. At the end, I heard from a tremendous number of new readers who were very bright, another big surprise. I have a whole new readership… It was very satisfying that I was able to convert my life‑long skills as a writer, regardless of the technology, to the new technology, and write a blog starting at the age of 89 that won the prize as the best blog of the year.”

I discuss with Zinsser the increased emphasis on video and multimedia in journalism 2.0, and that today’s editors require reporters to do a bit of everything. I ask Zinsser if he thinks the public is losing something by placing an increasingly heavy emphasis on these areas.

“Of course, we are losing something, which is an appreciation of the written word. That’s a rather odd thing to say since it’s been going on as the main prop since the King James Bible.”

Zinsser also fears what he calls an “epidemic of lost logic.”

“That’s because most people in the world now get their information from multiple sources, many of them visual images that are flickering on a screen. They are not arranged in any order. They’re coming at us from every direction. They’re coming through their wrists. They’re coming through their ears. They’re coming through God-knows-whatever other wires.”

Zinsser’s words take me back to my days as a student at Brandeis University. I’m in one of Prof. Michael Socolow’s journalism courses, and I’m learning about Edward R. Murrow’s famous “Wires and Lights in a Box Speech.”

This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and it can even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise it is merely wires and lights in a box. There is a great and perhaps decisive battle to be fought against ignorance, intolerance and indifference.

I press Zinsser for advice on how I should conduct my class, especially if I aim to educate marketable journalists.

“I would say to anybody teaching journalism or any kind of writing, the job is to teach them how to put one declarative sentence after another — and it always will be,” Zinsser says, noting that the same holds true whether one is speaking into a video camera or using any other piece of technology to disseminate information.

After Zinsser and I part ways, I review my notes and smile at one of his remarks.

“Get the darn story written as simply and as clearly and as warmly as possible.”

Sage advice.

Essay 3.4

How to Curb Student Cheating

Original date unconfirmed · June 28, 2018 (Medium archive) · Medium

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I’m growing increasingly uneasy over and frightened by the escalating pervasiveness of academic dishonesty.

For deeper insight, I reached out to Prof. Earl Babbie, author of the short but insightful paper, “Avoiding Plagiarism: And Avoiding the Dean’s Office.” Babbie tells me, “The thing that worries me most is that a culture starts to develop around that where ‘everyone’s [plagiarizing].’ Everyone isn’t doing it, but as long as that’s the perception, then it makes it that much easier to do it. That’s true for any kind of deviance.”

Students need to know that plagiarism, or academic dishonesty of any kind, isn’t at all akin to a minor offense like jaywalking. It’s a serious academic breach, and unlike jaywalking, everybody isn’t committing it. I don’t mean for teachers to scare their charges into obedience, but at the same time, students need to know the seriousness of cheating, and what can come from such behavior.

Certainly, students shoulder much of the blame for any sort of academic dishonesty. Still, it’s helpful to consider how teachers should respond to this problem. Here are some suggestions:

• Schools need to do a superior job of explaining and modeling character and moral behavior. Yesterday, I received an email from Jonathan Lamb, Assistant Head of School and Dean of Academics at The Storm King School in New York. “If we understand [students] are not intellectually complete when they arrive, we should not somehow expect them to be morally complete,” he writes. “We need to teach lessons that develop honesty, tenacity, fair play and other such virtues as well.” Lamb also writes that over the course of the year, schools need to constantly and meaningfully reiterate the importance of honesty, trust, and integrity. One assembly the first week of school just doesn’t cut it.
• Teachers need to report acts of academic dishonesty, Babbie tells me. He says, “I think professors and perhaps high school teachers are reluctant to put it in the student’s record. They think, ‘maybe I’m damaging them by doing this.’ But I think it’s important to do it, not to damage them but to allow the system to catch up with them.” Embarrassingly, for that same reason, my first year of teaching I didn’t report a blatant act of plagiarism, instead just giving that student a zero. I later learned that student had also acted dishonestly in several other courses, and that by not informing the dean, I had contributed (however indirectly) to her continued unfortunate lapse in judgment. The student in this account is different from Jane in Essay 5.5.
• Teachers need to do a much better job of teaching what constitutes plagiarism, how to avoid it, as well as how and when to cite. Digital natives are accustomed to instant gratification, and, in my experience, many students have difficulty understanding how or even why they need to internalize information, rather than reword or lift it from a site. To address this issue, I frequently show students examples of what I consider plagiarism, and how the author might have avoided the offense.
• Teachers should do more to guide students away from temptation. One way to do that, Lamb writes, is to help students “personalize or develop their own ideas in response to raw information.” Babbie offers an example of a teacher conducting a course on marriage and the family, and asking students to research their own background. Not only will more students likely feel a great affinity to this assignment, making shortcuts less enticing, but it’s much more difficult to plagiarize. Of course, this might not prevent devious students from simply writing falsehoods, but it’s certainly a possible deterrent.
• Another way to keep students honest, Babbie tells me, is to organize research papers or projects into several stages. As a first step, students provide a topic and maybe an introductory paragraph. Later, they submit sources, followed by an outline and a draft. Babbie says, “What I’ve found happening in my own experience is that’ll be going along just fine, and three days before the term paper is due, the student says, ‘Oh, I changed my mind. I found a much more interesting topic that I wanted to write about and here it is. Here’s the paper.’ Well, you kind of think that maybe they bought it or copied it.”
• Before a test, collect phones and have students remove their bags from the desks. Some students are quite talented at seeming to write something down, when they are in fact checking something with their phone in their lap. If a bag is on the table, impeding the teacher’s line of sight, students are more likely to get away with looking at not just their phones, but also other notes and cheating materials.
• Most importantly, teachers, administrators and policy-makers need to rethink the unethical and amoral behavior that grades and high-stakes testing promote. Yesterday, I received an email from Alden Blodget, advisor to the head of school at Long Trail School in Vermont. Bluntly, he writes, “Grades are the coin of the realm, and everything about school, particularly most independent schools, stresses the importance of getting good grades for college admissions. Kids cheat to get good grades because grades are infinitely more important than the learning that they are meant to stand for.”

Essay 3.5

Faking the College Application Essay

Original date unconfirmed · July 10, 2018 (Medium archive) · Medium

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I sit at my favorite sushi bar and see an intriguing Facebook post from Nikhil Goyal, the seventeen-year-old author of One Size Does Not Fit All: A Student’s Assessment of School.

Goyal links to a scathing Wall Street Journal op-ed by high school senior Suzy Lee Weiss, “To (All) the Colleges That Rejected Me.” Weiss makes me laugh and shriek, outlining everything wrong with the college admissions process — and there is no shortage of material.

Then there was summer camp. I should’ve done what I knew was best — go to Africa, scoop up some suffering child, take a few pictures, and write my essays about how spending that afternoon with Kinto changed my life. Because everyone knows that if you don’t have anything difficult going on in your own life, you should just hop on a plane so you’re able to talk about what other people have to deal with.

I’m interested in Weiss’s witty indictment of the college essay, especially because I recently spoke about this very issue with Andrew Ferguson, author of Crazy U: One Dad’s Crash Course In Getting His Kid Into College.

I’m eager to hear Ferguson’s take on Weiss’s piece, but I’m not surprised that he read it “cheering,” or that he felt she had “put her finger on it so perfectly.” It’s amazing how similar these two are — ideologically and in their clever, sharp writing style. I imagine that if Weiss and Ferguson ever teamed up, even Harvard would shake.

In Crazy U, Ferguson also derides the college essay. During our chat, I ask him to explain:

“The thing that really got me in the process of applying was the application essays, which I found to be either absurd, impertinent, intrusive, or simply beside the point,” Ferguson says. “They were asking things of 17-year-olds that most 17-year-olds, even college-bound 17-year-olds, just don’t have, like epiphanies, great turning points in their life, moments of self-revelation and so on and so on. The kids end up making them up.”

I like to consider myself hip and tech-savvy. But before reading Crazy U, I was completely unaware of the pervasiveness of online companies that, for a fee, produce customized essays. I stumble upon BuyEssay.org, among the most unethical, vile pieces of website trash I’ve ever visited. A glance at the homepage boils my blood, and I have nothing but spite for this company, and others like it, that use fear and intimidation to induce wholly unethical behavior.

Have you ever considered using an online essay writing service? If you are a straight A student, and never fail your exams, you would probably like to keep up your reputation now that you have found a well-paid part time job. You can buy an essay or any other paper from our service. Our custom writing service is so simple to use — you just place your order and get a completed paper in return.

The more I think about this essay-writing service, the more I think the colleges are also to blame for such sites even existing. Clearly, students and parents deserve a big slice of shame, but colleges demand insight and reflection that the vast majority of successful adults, however defined, would struggle to put into words.

Ferguson tells me about his visit to Katherine Cohen, who owns a “Platinum Package” private college admissions company in New York. Cohen charges upward of $40,000, depending on the service:

I think I say in the book that I talked to Katherine Cohen, who you mentioned earlier, and said my son was having a terrible time with these essays. She said, “You’ve just got to tell him that he has to dig deep. Dig deep and tell his innermost thoughts.” I said, “He’s a 17-year-old boy. He doesn’t have any innermost thoughts, and if he did, neither you nor I would want to know what they are.”

The college essay process disadvantages a certain type of kid, Ferguson says, “who doesn’t feel comfortable talking about himself, who isn’t particularly self-reflective, or is shy.”

I also think of Susan Cain’s Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking.

“This college dean grasped very well that the model employee of the midcentury — even one whose job rarely involved dealing with the public, like a research scientist in a corporate lab — was not a deep thinker but a hearty extrovert with a salesman’s personality,” Cain writes.

Well into the 21st century, it seems not much has changed — at least with respect to what college admissions officers expect from essays.

I speak with Bruce Musgrave, my editor, about how enough money can buy a top-rate college essay — and how this feeds into the notion that higher education in general is becoming increasingly elitist. He directs me to journalist Fareed Zakaria’s April 15 column in Time magazine, “The Thin-Envelope Crisis,” which reinforces my stance:

“The country’s best colleges and universities do admit lower-income students,” Zakaria writes. “But the competition has become so intense and the percentage admitted so small that the whole process seems arbitrary.”

Essay 3.6

AI Evangelists, Stop Calling Writing Teachers Luddites

May 4, 2026 · Generative AI (Medium)

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As a veteran high school humanities teacher, I’m writing about what I see across social media, in education forums, and in ongoing conversations with peers across school types and sizes, as well as with cognitive scientists and psychologists.

I want to be clear here because too often my concerns get misread and dismissed by those most eager to champion AI and its associated technologies. Restricting AI in my classroom is not a call for a universal ban. I see a role for optional reinforcement after a concept or skill has been developed.

I’m running out of patience.

When I raise legitimate concerns about integrating AI into teaching and learning, such as cognitive offloading, those outside my discipline rarely respond with curiosity or even civil disagreement. Instead, those concerns are often dismissed.

Often, I’m called out for “leaving students behind” or “resisting the future,” and told I should “make room” for new ideas and developments. Even when I argue for caution and measured adoption, critics too often hear a call to ban technology altogether. There’s no room for nuance.

Recently, when an educator in a closed Facebook group called me and others like me “Luddites,” I responded: “Luddites? Really? I advise The Gator, one of the most award-winning digital student news sites in the nation. But because I call for caution with AI integration, you label me anti-tech?”

I’m not proud of feeding the beast. I should know better, having read Outrage Machine: How Tech Amplifies Discontent, Disrupts Democracy — and What We Can Do About It by Tobias Rose-Stockwell, and having spoken with him for a recent Edutopia article.

He would have been right to call me out for not side-channeling and inviting the commenter into a private space rather than responding publicly.

“That’s a little bit hard in some of these groups that don’t start with good moderation policies in place,” Rose-Stockwell told me. “But sometimes a good member or steward of the community can step in and be a clarifying voice to reset the norms if things get too hot.”

In this case, I should have been that steward. I’m not offering excuses, and I should know better — but that’s still a difficult role to fill when what I’m seeing is a kind of blind absolutism about adoption from many (though certainly not all) tech enthusiasts who believe I must either fully embrace AI in my teaching or be labeled an “old fogey” who wants to ban it.

In that forced choice, there’s no room for caution or professional judgment — just a forced binary that flattens everything in between. It makes meaningful conversation difficult and real concerns easy to ignore.

And yet, much of the push to rapidly adopt AI comes from outside the humanities — often from people who don’t use academic writing as a primary mode of teaching but still tell us how it should be taught.

I don’t do this to other disciplines. I don’t tell math or science teachers to abandon fundamentals just because something can be automated. I trust that those closest to the work understand what can’t be replaced without losing something essential.

This isn’t just about how students produce writing. It’s about what writing demands of them. Increasingly, this climate feels less like collaboration and more like overreach.

Another common response I hear is, “Just teach students to be critical of what AI produces.” That sounds reasonable — until you examine what it requires.

Students cannot critically evaluate writing without a solid foundation in writing. They cannot judge clarity, structure, argument, or style if they haven’t developed those capacities themselves.

You don’t learn to evaluate quality by outsourcing the process that produces it. It’s like asking people who have never learned to cook to critique a meal prepared by Gordon Ramsay. They may have opinions, but without knowledge, they can’t judge technique or skill.

The same applies here. If students rely on AI before they’ve built the habits and skills of writing, then “being critical of the output” becomes guesswork masquerading as evaluation.

Continue to share your expertise in your own discipline. But if you are not teaching writing, allow writing educators to guide decisions about writing instruction.

Please, trust the judgment of those teaching writing every day. Recognize that my concerns are grounded in evidence and experience — not fear.

My stance is about protecting the conditions that allow students to think deeply and develop their own ideas through writing. If I’m wrong, I’ll see it and adjust. That’s how my classroom works.

But if the AI evangelists are wrong, and this push toward constant AI use erodes students’ ability to think, write, and develop ideas independently, that loss won’t be easy to recover from. It won’t show up in frameworks or presentations, but it will show up in their thinking.

That’s why, while everyone’s voice is welcome, when it comes to how to teach writing, this is primarily the humanities’ lane. I hope we can each bring our best to our respective areas of expertise.