‘It Was Terrible’: AI Failures Make Writing by Hand Better for Thinking Skills in One Classroom

Stacks of worksheets sit atop desks and tables in Chanea Bond’s Fort Worth classroom. Her students all have their own school-issued laptops, but Bond has swapped computers for paper — lots of paper.

Each class begins with several minutes of journaling in notebooks, and nearly all assignments must be handwritten and physically turned in.

“If you walk into almost any one of my classes today, you will see that all of my students are handwriting,” Bond says, “and they are journaling, and they are constantly and consistently doing everything with a pen or a pencil.”

Bond teaches at Southwest High School in the Fort Worth Independent School District, which serves mostly students from low-income backgrounds. She says going almost entirely analog is the best way she’s found to keep generative artificial intelligence out of her American literature and composition classes.

“A lot of people say to me: ‘Aren’t you afraid that they’re going to get behind?’ And my response is: ‘I know that when my students leave my class that they know how to think and they know how to write.'”

Recent data suggests educators may be embracing AI more than they’re eschewing it, like Bond has. Roughly 60% of surveyed teachers said they used AI at least a little in their classroom, according to a July 2025 poll from the EdWeek Research Center.

Initially, Bond says she tried to incorporate AI into her teaching. She had students read and annotate the poem Still I Rise by Maya Angelou, and then she allowed them to use AI to write a thesis statement for a literary analysis.

“It was terrible,” she says, adding that it was clear the students who used AI weren’t really engaging with the text.

“They didn’t know the material because they had outsourced that level of thinking and they didn’t have to come to a conclusion or an argument about the text they were studying on their own.”

She realized her students couldn’t always discern whether what AI generated was valuable or not, and they still needed to build foundational skills, like how to write a thesis and construct an argument.

“Where are those skills going to be built, if not here?” Bond asks.

What AI-free teaching looks like

Bond says journaling by hand at the start of every class gets her students in the practice of writing and builds their confidence to write longer pieces. It also allows Bond to learn their writing voices.

“I know that I have a lot of students who don’t believe that their voices sound academic enough,” Bond says. “I like to give them low stakes opportunities to start cultivating what they want to say and how they want to say it.”

And instead of grading only the final essay or presentation, Bond grades the different parts of the process, including the thesis, the outline, the bibliography and the handwritten draft.

“The steps matter to the cumulative overall grade because that’s how I know that the thinking is happening,” Bond says. “I think a student is less likely to turn in something that is written by AI if they’ve had to show me the beginning, the middle and the end, and the different pieces that go into it.”

When students reach the final stages of this process, Bond has them type their essays out. Unless they have accommodations for a disability, Bond says this is the only time students use computers in her class.

The response from students

Meyah Alvarez, a junior, was initially confused by Bond’s approach. She says at the beginning of the school year, she turned in a typed outline for a poetry analysis podcast and Bond told her to re-do it by hand because it would help her think and write better.

“It was different, but I do like it now,” Alvarez says. “I feel like it actually does get my brain thinking.”

Literature classes haven’t always been Alvarez’s favorite, but she says she loves Bond’s lessons. She likes the interactive nature of her assignments and that Bond gives students opportunities to write about their opinions and experiences.

“Ms. Bond’s approach is very good. Like, she makes it to where AI can’t even really help you at this point,” Alvarez says.

Several of Bond’s students told NPR they appreciate Bond’s AI ban because they’re opposed to the technology for environmental and ethical reasons. But virtually all of them say AI-use on school assignments is widespread among their peers.

“Maybe some of us don’t want to admit that we use it because it’s kind of a cultural taboo,” says sophomore Eligh Ellison.

Ellison says he’s used AI to help him with schoolwork in the past, and to brainstorm names for characters in stories he writes. But he supports Bond’s AI ban. He says her class is an opportunity to figure out what he thinks — not what AI thinks.

“I think that AI does have a time and a place, but especially as it’s still evolving and a lot of us are still yet to make solid opinions, we’re standing on shaky ground.”

Even students who have gotten caught using AI in Bond’s class say they’ve learned from the experience.

T, a junior, says he turned to AI after waiting until the last minute to complete a bibliography on his chosen research topic: the adultification of children. His family requested we only use his first initial so he can talk freely without it impacting college applications.

“It probably wasn’t smart, but also I had other work to do. So I put it through AI. I had it write it for me.”

Bond says she realized immediately that T had used AI. She was disappointed, but she tried not to take it personally.

“He really felt overwhelmed and he got to a point where he felt really afraid of not turning something in, and so he turned something in,” Bond says.

T redid the assignment from scratch with help from Bond.

He says he now has this advice for students who may be tempted to use AI to do their schoolwork for them: “Take a second and think about it. Would you rather really grow from an experience of actually doing some work and critically thinking about the things you’re writing or talking about, or just taking nothing away from it and just use a robot?”

How others are embracing the technology

Not every teacher agrees with Bond’s approach – including her friend, Brett Vogelsinger, who teaches English at Central Bucks High School South outside Philadelphia.

He says he tries to model responsible AI use to his students, showing them the difference between using the technology to cheat and using it to advance their learning.

Vogelsinger says he wants his students to be able “to determine that this particular use is shortcutting and shortchanging my thinking and this use is pushing me and actually making me think more.”

And he allows AI use on some assignments — so long as students are transparent about how they used it.

But even Vogelsinger, who wrote a book about using AI in writing instruction, says he’s still figuring out how and when to incorporate AI into teaching: “We’re very much in the experimental phase of all this.”

And while Bond and many of her students see the value of an AI-free classroom, the federal government, some states and some school districts are embracing the technology.

Miami-Dade County Public Schools, one of the country’s largest districts, gives high schoolers access to Google’s Gemini chatbot.

“The future is now,” said Miami-Dade Superintendent Jose Dotres, in a video published on the Google for Education YouTube account. “We have to embrace the fact that AI is becoming an important tool for not only learning, but teaching.”

New Jersey set aside over a million dollars in grants last year to advance classroom AI use. The governor at the time, Phil Murphy, said it was an effort to invest in “the next generation of tech leaders.”

And last spring, the Trump administration issued an executive order to expand AI education in K-12 schools through public-private partnerships and grants for AI teacher training. Guidance from the U.S. Department of Education also supports “responsible adoption of AI” in schools.

Bond says she’s open to changing her mind, but right now she doesn’t see much value in AI for her students.

“It’s less harmful to me to make sure that they can do the things without the AI than to try and push the AI into my classroom knowing that, at least for some of them, it’s going to mean that they don’t get to acquire the skills that they need,” Bond says.

This reporting was supported by a grant from the Tarbell Center for AI Journalism and the Omidyar Network’s Reporters in Residence program.