I am beginning to wonder if I have become the Cassandra of the education space, which is not exactly the niche I planned to occupy.
In February 2020, I started warning that schools needed to think seriously about remote teaching. People looked at me like I had suggested we begin holding faculty meetings underwater. The idea that schools might actually close felt absurd.
Then March happened.
So when I say I can hear the drums now, I am paying attention.
Ban the phones. Close the laptops. Take away the iPads. Back to paper, back to pencils, back to “real learning.”
And I get it. I teach kids in grades 4 through 6. I know exactly what happens when a screen opens. I have watched a student move from a French assignment to a completely unrelated tab with the speed and confidence of a Wall Street trader. I have also watched students use technology to avoid doing the exact thinking I wanted them to do.
Ask a fifth grader to write three sentences about what they like to do and suddenly the French is suspiciously flawless. Vocabulary we have never used appears. Verb forms descend from the heavens. A child who five minutes ago was unsure whether “I like” was j’aime or je suis is now producing something that sounds like it came out of a graduate seminar at the Sorbonne.
We all know what happened.
And now AI has entered the room. So yes, I understand the drums. But I am getting nervous about where they are leading us, because I think we are in danger of replacing one lazy idea with another.
For years, the lazy idea was that technology automatically made learning better. Put it on a Chromebook and suddenly it was innovative. Make it interactive and it was engaging. Add a game mechanic and we were preparing students for the future.
We are starting to realize that none of that was necessarily true. Good. We should realize it.
But now I worry we are heading straight toward the opposite lazy idea: technology is the problem, and if we remove the technology, learning will improve.
That is not necessarily true either.
A bad worksheet does not become good pedagogy because I printed it. A packet is not rigorous because it is stapled. Copying vocabulary from the board into a notebook is not somehow more intellectually demanding than copying it from a screen. A classroom full of silent children filling in blanks with pencils can be every bit as disengaged as a classroom full of children clicking through an app.
The question cannot simply be: screen or no screen?
The question has to be: what are the kids actually doing?
That matters enormously in a language classroom. If I want my fifth graders to communicate in French, I need them communicating in French. That sounds painfully obvious. It is apparently not.
I can give two students a piece of paper with different information on it and suddenly they have a reason to talk. Tu as le chien? Non. J’ai le chat. Où est le chien? Je ne sais pas. Ask someone else. Point. Gesture. Try again. Forget a word. Look at the word wall. Use the wrong word. Laugh. Fix it. Keep going.
That is language learning.
It does not look terribly impressive from the hallway. There is no glowing screen. No animation. No digital badge. No confetti exploding when somebody gets an answer right. Just two kids trying to make meaning together.
And there is a lot happening in that little exchange. They are listening, retrieving language, watching another person’s face, taking a risk, realizing they were misunderstood, and trying again.
There is friction.
I have started thinking a lot about friction.
We spent years trying to remove it. Make everything seamless. Make everything intuitive. One click. Auto-save. Auto-correct. Predictive text. Translation. Now AI can finish the thought before the kid has even really had one.
That is incredibly convenient. It may also be exactly the problem.
Sometimes the hesitation matters. Sometimes the ten seconds of staring at the ceiling trying to remember the word for “swimming” matters. Sometimes the student saying, “Wait, I know this,” matters. Sometimes I do not want the answer to arrive immediately. I want the brain searching for it.
But that still does not mean I want technology gone.
Technology gives my students things I could not possibly give them alone. I can show a fourth grader a video of a child their own age speaking French in Québec. I can pull up a street market in Senegal. We can listen to an interview from France. We can look at a menu from Martinique. We can hear accents that are not mine. We can see French living in places far beyond the neat little hexagon on the classroom map.
That is not a gimmick. That matters.
So yes, sometimes I want the Chromebook open. And sometimes I very much want it closed.
The difference is becoming clearer to me. I want technology when it opens a door. I do not need it when it simply replaces a pencil.
If a student is watching an authentic video from the Francophone world, technology is doing something powerful. If a student is typing the answers to a digital worksheet that could just as easily have been printed, I am less convinced.
If students are recording themselves speaking, listening back, and noticing what they can improve, there may be a real reason for the device. If they are making a slideshow because every project in school apparently eventually becomes a slideshow, maybe not.
If they are talking to someone in another country, wonderful. If they are sitting three feet away from a classmate and messaging each other inside a shared document, I have questions.
And then there is AI.
I am not interested in pretending it is going away. It is not. I am also not interested in pretending that using it automatically prepares children for some inevitable AI future.
There are things my students need to be able to do before I want a machine doing those things for them.
They need ideas before they need help polishing ideas. They need vocabulary before they need a tool suggesting better vocabulary. They need to develop a voice before I hand them something that can imitate one.
They also need to experience what it feels like not to know what to say next.
That may be one of the most important things happening in a language classroom, because communication is messy. Real people do not give you four answer choices. Real conversations do not come with a word bank.
Sometimes you misunderstand. Sometimes you need the person to repeat themselves. Sometimes you say something weird. Sometimes you point. Sometimes you mime. Sometimes you completely abandon the sentence you started and find another way into the idea.
That is not failure.
That is communication.
I worry that the more polished our tools become, the less tolerance we have for that mess. And kids need the mess, especially young kids.
Give me the mini whiteboards. Give me the picture cards scattered across the table. Give me the sticky notes. Give me the partner who forgot what he was supposed to say. Give me the kid drawing something because she cannot remember the word. Give me sixteen slightly chaotic conversations happening at once. Give me the student walking across the room to ask somebody a question.
Give me the giant paper. Give me the markers. Give me the word wall. Give me the ridiculous gestures. Give me the moment when half the class suddenly understands what I have been saying in French for the last thirty seconds.
That room is not anti-technology.
It is pro-human.
That is the distinction I keep coming back to.
So when the drums get louder, and I suspect they will, I hope we resist the temptation to declare victory by collecting every device and congratulating ourselves.
Closing the laptop is not the instructional goal.
Opening the brain is.
And sometimes the best tool for that is a screen. Sometimes it is a pencil. Sometimes it is a deck of cards. Sometimes it is a piece of paper with half the information missing.
And very often, especially in a language classroom, it is another human being sitting across the table saying:
Je ne comprends pas.
And waiting for you to figure out what to do next.
Nathan Lutz 