Dana Goldstein of The New York Times reached out to students and teachers in schools and colleges to find out how they teach writing in the age of AI.
What she learned was that many teachers are expecting students to write in class, not at home, to ensure that they are not turning in essays written by AI.
For today’s high school and college students, the all-night writing session, hunched over a laptop at home or in a library carrel, is on the way out.
In the era of artificial intelligence, take-home writing assignments have become so difficult to police for integrity that many educators have simply stopped assigning them.
Instead, in a rapid shift, teachers are requiring students to write inside the classroom, where they can be observed. Assignments have changed too, with some educators prompting students to reflect on their personal reactions to what they’ve learned and read — the type of writing that A.I. struggles to credibly produce.
This transformation is happening across the educational landscape, from suburban districts and urban charter schools to community colleges and the Ivy League.
The New York Times heard from nearly 400 college and high school educators who responded to a callout about how generative A.I. is changing writing instruction. Almost all described a deep rethinking of how to teach writing — and whether it still matters, since A.I. has become a better writer than most students (and adults), they said.
Teachers are responding to a widespread challenge. Over the past year, A.I. use has become ubiquitous among American students. Between May and December of 2025, the share of American middle school, high school and college students who reported regularly using A.I. for homework increased from 48 to 62 percent, according to polling from RAND — even as two-thirds of students said the technology harmed critical-thinking skills. A third of the students reported using A.I. to draft or revise writing.
The link is a gift article. Feel free to open and read.

With the iPhone wave, I began taking phones in a shoe sack at the entrance to class, and relied on in-class essays 20 years ago. Taught AP History. Randy Wieck ________________________________
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Very smart! Prescient.
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“…two-thirds of students said the technology harmed critical-thinking skills.”
Ya think? Not a whole lot of thought going into punching a few keys to computer generate an essay.
AI needs to be carefully regulated. Thinking and human agency cannot be made obsolete. The time would come when AI no longer had human thought to pirate. Any “learning” would be completely program to program. For a while, the owner class would benefit from eliminating workers, but those workers won’t be able to buy the goods they used to produce or use the services they used to provide.
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so much depends
upon
the white sheet
of water
falling
over rock
cold, broken
into spray
touching
everything
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ChatGPT upon being asked how Eillism Carlos Williams would describe a waterfall
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William, of course
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ChatGPT on the death of Alexander Turrentine:
Alexander Turrentine was killed in 1847 during a period of intense local conflict and violence on the American frontier. Accounts from that time suggest his death was not random but tied to personal or community disputes—most likely involving tensions over land, resources, or allegiances, which were common causes of violence in that era.
This is complete BS worthy of any smart student who did not know the story. The actual story was that he and another local man were loading a cannon to fire it in celebration of the end of the Mexican War and it fired prematurely. My relative was a publisher of a local Whig newspaper.
So much for AI.
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I blame the standardized five paragraph essay teachers have been forced to teach. Anything that formulaic and mindless was begging for something like AI to take it over. We need to get across that writing is because you have something to say (and because you are a unique human being only you can say it) and that the best way to write it is whatever way communicates it best.
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I was thinking of making the cynical argument that A.I. seems to be leveling the playing field for middle class and low-income students whose parents don’t hire tutors to “help” make a student’s home writing assignments better. But instead, I will just tip my hat to teachers who assign writing assignments in-class. Hopefully that doesn’t always mean handwritten essays, however, as it seems to put an unnecessary burden on students who have grown up typing – let them use computers with software downloaded that doesn’t allow access to outside material. Presumably the goal is to encourage a love of writing, not burden the students without good fine motor skills to dread coming to class.
In the late 1970s, the best English teacher in my midwestern public school taught us to write essays using the five paragraph method, emphasizing that whatever thesis statement we wanted to make had to be supported by evidence, and a conclusion based on that evidence. Surprisingly, my college professors seemed to like that fairly dull style of writing so much that I wondered if it was unusual in a college where many students came from private schools or affluent public schools on the east and west coasts. Now, style over substance seems to be the norm in journalism, and I wish more reporters had been taught that “a Republican says this and a partisan Democrat questions it” doesn’t qualify as evidence supporting whatever they believe is the only news fit to print.
I don’t think there is any magic bullet. Having students write in class is only as good as the time and ability the teacher has to respond to struggling student writers with personal input about how to make their writing better. Having students write in class allows teachers to identify students who can’t write well, who presumably wouldn’t have been identified if AI is writing their essay. But that doesn’t necessarily turn them into better writers.
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I forwarded this via text to my daughter who’s teaching in a Brooklyn high school.
Immediate reply: “Yep”.
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FWIW — description of my experiment testing ChatGPT on literary analysis. I call it “Breaking ChatGPT.”
https://lennyrothbart.substack.com/p/breaking-chatgpt
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