FORT WORTH, Texas, Jan 29, 2026, 03:23 (CST)
- A Fort Worth English teacher has banned generative AI and shifted most classwork to handwriting
- The move contrasts with districts rolling out chatbots for students and teachers experimenting with AI use
- Separate teacher essays are urging simpler classroom walls, citing evidence that visual clutter can hurt focus
A Fort Worth high school English teacher has pulled school-issued laptops out of day-to-day classwork and pushed students back to pen and paper to keep generative artificial intelligence from doing their thinking.
The classroom turnabout lands as U.S. schools argue over how to handle generative AI — software that can produce text and answers from a prompt — and as more teachers test the tools for planning and feedback while trying to curb cheating.
It is not just the screens. Teachers are also debating how much “stuff” belongs on classroom walls, with educators warning that crowded, social-media-ready rooms can overload attention and working memory, the short-term mental “scratchpad” students use to learn.
In Chanea Bond’s American literature and composition classes at Southwest High School, most assignments must be handwritten and turned in on paper, an NPR report said. “All of my students are handwriting,” Bond said. Npr
Bond, who teaches in the Fort Worth Independent School District, said she initially tried to incorporate AI but pulled back after students used it to write a thesis statement for a literary analysis of Maya Angelou’s “Still I Rise.” “It was terrible,” she said, arguing that students who leaned on AI were not engaging with the text.
Instead of grading only a final essay, Bond grades the steps — thesis, outline, bibliography and a handwritten draft — to make it harder to hand in a finished piece written by a bot. “The steps matter,” she said, framing it as proof that the thinking is happening.
Some students told NPR the approach felt odd at first but made them slow down. Junior Meyah Alvarez said it “get my brain thinking,” while other students described AI use on assignments as widespread, even if it is a “cultural taboo.”
Bond’s approach is not the only one in play. English teacher Brett Vogelsinger, a friend of Bond’s outside Philadelphia, told NPR he tries to model responsible use and says schools are still in an “experimental phase,” allowing AI on some assignments if students are transparent.
School systems are also moving in the opposite direction, rolling out chatbots as official tools. Miami-Dade County Public Schools in Florida gives high schoolers access to Google’s Gemini, NPR reported, and Superintendent Jose Dotres said in a video: “The future is now.”
A separate debate is unfolding around what students see all day. In a Teacher Magazine essay published on Thursday, Australian educator Andressa Bassani urged teachers to cut back on wall displays, writing that when everything is loud, “the brain stops listening,” and citing studies linking highly decorated classrooms to distraction and poorer learning performance. She quoted classroom management author Bill Rogers: “You can’t teach through misbehaviour.” Teachermagazine
An earlier EducationHQ piece by literacy specialist and learning sciences consultant Jo Griffin made a similar argument, warning that “Calm does not mean bare” and that visual clutter can add “extraneous cognitive load” — mental effort that does not help students learn — with a heavier impact on some vulnerable learners. Griffin wrote that “the real Pinterest boards” should be in students’ minds, not on the walls. Educationhq
But hard lines can cut both ways. Teachers who ban AI risk leaving students without practice in how to use it — and how to spot when it is wrong — while stripping classrooms too far can undercut warmth, belonging and routines that many students rely on.
For Bond, the trade-off is worth it, at least for now. She told NPR she would rather make sure students can write and argue without a machine, even as districts and teachers elsewhere lean into chatbots and as educators rethink whether “more” on the walls is really helping students focus.
