My intention on an early July morning was not to wake up at four o’clock to check on my students’ AP scores. It’s obsessive behavior, and kind of embarrassing. But I was nervous for good reason.
This past school year I decided to try something utterly radical, so pedagogically edgy, in fact, I felt compelled to warn my principal about it ahead of time. My plan for the new school year was simple: teach my AP Government classes like it was 1980.
This wasn’t an aging teacher’s nostalgic attempt to revisit Ronald Reagan’s victory over Jimmy Carter or a weird justification for blaring disco as the students walked into class each day. I wanted to re-create—as much as possible—a world of authentic learning for my students, a world that was slowly being hollowed out by the digital omnipresence of technology in their lives.
Crafting the appropriate classroom policies was the simple part. No Chromebooks (I even unplugged and emptied the Chromebook cart). No AI. I lectured. We had lively class discussions that connected the curriculum to current events.
The students completed all their homework using a pencil and notecards. Tests were taken using Scantron test forms. If they needed to write a response, I gave them a pen and a piece of blank white paper. On exam days they weren’t allowed to wear smartwatches.
For the first time in my career, I gave my students a block of time at the end of class to read an article that had been assigned to them. I made sure to provide a hard copy of the reading material so they could take notes or underline important passages.
I didn’t take this classroom experiment to an overly eccentric extreme. They weren’t forced to churn butter during class or use carrier pigeons to communicate with me. The students were free to email or contact me using the district’s messaging app. I still used PowerPoint slides. I didn’t take down my whiteboard and replace it with a chalkboard or lecture in bell-bottoms and shoulder pads. And, of course, YouTube can be a civics teacher’s best friend.
Most of my students are genuinely wonderful people. I teach in an urban high school in the Central Valley of California—think agriculture, oil, hot summers, and bad air quality. Most of the young people in my classes come from modest backgrounds. Many will be the first in their families to attend college. A large percentage are first- or second-generation Americans. Many of them work after school, help support their families, and usually come to class with a smile on their faces.
They are the living, breathing, red-white-and-blue embodiment of the American spirit. But they are also students of this generation.
They have attended school in an era defined by an overreliance on educational technology and a relentless lowering of standards. It shows.
AI has empowered students to outsource virtually any assignment not completed in the classroom, while years of digital distraction have weakened the habits of reading, concentration, and sustained thought. College professors now openly wonder whether history and English can still be taught as serious disciplines. Some film majors cannot even make it through an entire movie.
And yet their performance last year was staggering—and I don’t say that lightly. I knew this year had been different, but I hadn’t appreciated how different. For years, I celebrated the Class of 2011 because almost 90 students passed the AP exam that year.
This year, I had 111 students with passing scores.
To be fair—and modest—the AP exam has become much easier to pass in the past few years, and not just a little bit easier, but dramatically easier. And maybe, just maybe, we got lucky with the questions that ended up on the exam.
But even if this were not an AP class, even if the kids had performed horribly on the exam, the quality of the educational experience this year was markedly different—and better—than it had been since before COVID. The question I often receive when I share my 1980s teaching experiment is “That had to be really hard with this generation of kids, right?”
But the truth is: It wasn’t particularly difficult. The kids didn’t fight that hard. I simply had to be consistent and vigilant. Which is not to say we didn’t have some sticky moments and bumpy days on the path toward success.
Occasionally, I lost my patience. There were days when I had to show my cantankerous teeth. It didn’t matter how much I liked the students or how strong our rapport had become. Every single class period, without exception, at least one student had to be reminded to put away a phone or pull an earbud from an ear.
And teenagers being teenagers, they were relentless in probing for loopholes. I quickly discovered that digital devices in a classroom are like water on a sinking ship—or money in American politics: They always find a way in. Some students wore their headphones just off their ears so they could insist they weren’t technically wearing them. Others kept the volume so low that only they could hear it. Those with longer hair often tried to conceal a single earbud beneath it, certain they had outsmarted me.
They weren’t being overtly defiant. And they certainly didn’t argue when they got caught. They simply found it almost impossible to disconnect—even for 50 minutes—from the digital world. Policing my own policies was grueling, at times. I understand why so many modern American teachers have grown frustrated in recent years, even a bit fatalistic.
Teaching increasingly feels like working in an ER where doctors know they are losing their patients. In 2008, 62% of American teachers were “very satisfied” with their jobs. Fast-forward past the advent of cellphones and the zombification of our students rejecting the real world in favor of living on apps instead. Again, fast-forward past COVID and the normalization of distance learning and the loneliness epidemic of our children. Arrive at the present, when AI now functions like a modern-day genie’s lamp—it tempts with instant answers, effortless writing, and easy learning. Add it all together and it should surprise no one that the percentage of teachers who are “very satisfied” is no longer 62%. As recently as 2022, it was 12%.
As a high school teacher, I certainly don’t know how to confront this civilizational challenge. But I do know what we teachers in our tiny corner of the world must do: Stop compounding these failures in our own classrooms. I know we shouldn’t add our voices to this chorus of epochal decline or pour kerosene on recent fires of academic decline. Because the problems our students face are not simply tech-related.
We do our children no favors by abolishing failing grades and then celebrating when we simultaneously have record graduation rates and record low test scores. We do our children no favors when we use the banner of “equity” to eliminate exams and abolish standardized testing from admissions yet are forced to backstop these misguided efforts by providing remedial classes at elite universities.
Instead, our classrooms should be enclaves of aspiration and hives of high expectations for a simple reason: Our students are capable of so much more than we are asking of them. We must abandon the idea that an education of ease scaffolded on endless screens can ever achieve a fraction of the success of classrooms powered by traditional methods and traditional expectations.
And there is hope.
The old-school teaching methods I embraced this year seem to be vindicated every day. Taking notes on a laptop instead of writing in a notebook impairs learning because it “results in shallower processing.” In Sweden, schools are now abandoning their reliance on screens and have established the goal for all students to have a printed textbook in every subject. LA Unified, the nation’s second-largest school district, has now adopted restrictions on student cellphones due to worries about student anxiety and declining mental health. Direct instruction, though long scorned by educational hipsters chasing the latest fads, overwhelmingly remains the most effective method of teaching.
My experiment last year was richer and more civically serious that simply trying to resuscitate the magic of the classes I had taught earlier in my career. Everyone in my profession complains about phone obsession, dwindling attention spans, and the scourge of low expectations. But behind the renaissance I experienced was a powerful ambition to prove to myself and others that the mental and moral habits required to become a citizen in an advanced modern liberal democracy are not impossible to cultivate.
If we are to save the American way of life, that act of renewal will not take place in the halls of Congress or by way of presidential fiat. Quite simply, it must begin in the same place where it is currently imperiled: the American classroom. And it doesn’t require a romanticized return to the elite curriculum of earlier eras where students mastered Ancient Greek and Latin in their early teens or could recite long passages of Cicero or Demosthenes by memory.
But they do need an attention span. They do need robust reading and writing skills. Most of all, modern civics must avoid trendy traps like project-based learning. Our students and our democracy are better served if our students possess a rich battery of knowledge about our history and where American political values come from.
We don’t need more activists. We need students who can have an informed conversation.
The day after my students took the AP exam, I asked them to fill out a short questionnaire about the class. I wanted honest feedback beyond the fact that I knew they had endured one Dad joke too many. But what surprised me wasn’t what they said. It was what they didn’t say. No one asked for more screen time. Not one student told me to relax or “chill” about phones. There were no complaints about the daily reading.
This year’s success reminded me that teachers can wrest back the power we once had—power to bequeath our students a future inspired by humanity’s many Muses rather than one seduced by the Sirens of their screens. My students demonstrated that they could do much more than pass an AP exam. They could meet high expectations. They could summon the focus to study, the interest to read, and the capacity to write.
In short, they have everything it takes to acquire a meaningful and inspired education. Only one question remains: Do we have the courage to ask it of them?
