When I was a child, computers were a fixture in my home, from the giant Atari on which I learned my ABCs, to the Commodore Amiga that my dad used for his videography business, to the PC towers that facilitated my first forays onto the internet. But tech was still a niche hobby back then. Even in college in the late 1990s and early 2000s, many of my friends got by just fine without computers.
For people in college now—namely, my students—things are decidedly different. Gadgets are everywhere, and are increasingly designed to insert themselves into every aspect of our consciousness, colonizing every spare moment of our time and attention. Gen Z and Gen Alpha have never known a world without mini-computers within arm’s reach. They learned to relate to the world through gadgets, to turn to them for everything from entertainment to education to escape. And when the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted their lives, it took away even more of their access to the offline world, making tech feel paradoxically both like a lifeline and a prison.
It's easy to call young people “screenagers” and blame them for being glued to their devices. But I know better. My students feel conflicted; they know they’re hooked, and they worry for their younger siblings who seem even more in the grip of all-consuming tech.
Several years ago, it occurred to me that I could do something to help. I began requiring students to put away all devices, including laptops and tablets, in my classes. It was an experiment both for them and for me: What happens when we remove the barrier tech has put between us and other people, between us and our own thoughts? What does that teach us about how to handle the explosion of hype around generative AI?
How I went from gadget geek to tech skeptic
My own journey with tech predates our always-on devices, way back to that old Atari. I had always been a little obsessed with gadgets, and when I bought my first iPhone in 2008, it was almost a religious experience.
My wife and I were living in New York City, and my entire family drove down from Boston to witness my initiation. Like pilgrims, we journeyed together to the flagship Apple Store on Fifth Avenue. We all stood in reverence at the foot of the spiral staircase, beneath the illuminated glass cube, as I was welcomed into the cult of Apple.
From then on, almost without fail, I’ve upgraded my phone annually, a September ritual as cyclical for me as going back to school. And it wasn't just the iPhone; I had the first or second iteration of the iPad, AirPods, and the Apple Watch, too. Back then it felt like Steve Jobs might announce something that would reshape the world every time he stepped on stage.
But in the 2010s, something started to change. Underwhelming new tech releases grew increasingly common, and the constant hype around them began to feel empty and manipulative. As both a college professor and a parent, I began to see the benefits of our always-connected devices becoming overshadowed by the negatives. The young people in my life are obsessed with their gadgets, legitimately afraid they’ll be disconnected from society if they aren’t extremely online, and they hate it. Many worry as much as their parents do about their phone use.
So, even before the hype that greeted the AI revolution of the last few years, I’d begun to look a lot more skeptically at claims that tech was changing our lives, and that more apps, devices, or wearables were automatically better.
What happens when we turn off the tech?
One day, near the end of the spring semester in 2019, I looked out at my class to see rows of students focused intently… on their laptop screens. They presumably had their devices out to take notes, but I wasn’t lecturing. I was trying to lead them into a discussion. This moment for me is trapped in time: It was the moment I decided I had to take drastic measures to recapture my students’ attention.
The following fall, my syllabus included a new section, which has remained in place since. I call it my in-class technology use policy and it begins, “This class is a laptop/mobile phone/tablet/headphone/AirPods-free zone. Bring a notebook and pens to each class.” I explain my reasoning and, like a good academic, cite my sources. I provide exceptions for emergencies, explaining that if a student has to take an urgent call, they can quietly slip out of the classroom to do so without judgment or penalty.
That first fall, I was nervous. Would they go along with it? Would my classes, previously well-loved, suddenly struggle to fill? To my great relief there was no significant pushback, no mass exodus. Going tech-free is still a shock, to be sure. At the start of each semester, an hour and fifteen minutes without a phone seems impossible for many students. But in time, most find it to be a relief. It gives them permission to take a break from the requirement to be always connected, always reachable, always on. Hopefully, it also creates space for deep and sustained thought.
I begin most classes by distributing an article to read—often a recently-published opinion piece—printed on paper. I encourage students to read it with pen in hand, marking it up as they go. As they read quietly, I look around the room at a group of so-called screenagers concentrating, without a device in sight. When they finish reading, they open their notebooks and write a response, by hand. In those first few weeks, I often see students massaging their palms, sore from lack of practice. After they write for five minutes or so, I open a discussion on what we just read and, distraction-free, the students engage.
In those discussions, I love that my students are actually paying attention to one another when they speak. Not everyone of course; some look sleepy and bored, but even that is better than distracted. I call this productive boredom: Without a phone or laptop to divert them, there is little left to do other than sit with their thoughts. What a gift. I ask them, “When was the last time your only task was to think?”
Lessons for the AI invasion
This experiment with a device-free classroom has also shaped my response to the AI revolution (I sometimes think of it more as an AI invasion) that has swept higher education since the debut of ChatGPT in 2022. Like smartphones before them, AI tools are wrapped in revolutionary rhetoric, trying to convince all of us that we’ll be left behind if we don’t drop our old habits overnight and jump on the bandwagon.
I’m not a luddite: I continue to be as curious about new technologies as ever. As soon as it came out, I peppered ChatGPT with questions to see if it could imitate my writing style. (It kind of can!) And I know there’s no going back; whether we like it or not, AI will be a significant presence in our lives, and I see it as my job to teach students how to use it responsibly. In my long journey with tech, I’ve learned that we can incorporate devices into our work without surrendering to marketing hype and manufactured FOMO.
As a writing professor, my job is to convince students that, as William Zinsser wrote, “writing is thinking on paper.” The process of writing — not the final product — is what sharpens our logical reasoning and self-expression. For students who don’t use AI in smart ways, the result is essays that are all product, no process — and no process means no real learning.
In my classes, students glimpse a time before they were born, when fewer distractions inhibited learning, when sitting with one’s thoughts—and, yes, being bored—could be productive and creative. I’m reminded, too, of why I love teaching, for the magic that happens when 20 people sit together in a room attending to one another and talking about ideas.
When we leave the classroom, we’ll go back to our devices, and even to our new AI tools. But hopefully the time away from them reminds us we have the power to keep tech in its place—and gives us a taste of what only human minds can do.
