This post was originally written on my personal blog in 2003. It has been revised and reposted each year since then.

It feels like just yesterday.

I had moved into my dorm at Douglass College just days earlier. As I sat in the dining hall with my best friend Erin chatting about our schedules on that beautiful morning, I remember hearing the morning radio show on the overhead speakers talking about the Twin Towers. I also remember Erin and I wondering aloud why talk radio was being broadcast in the dining hall. Why were the hosts talking about something that had happened in 1993? We tuned it out; it was nothing more than white noise in the background. We were college students and it didn’t seem important. We finished breakfast and headed across campus to our classes.

I went to my Women and Public Policy class; it was a class of about 50-60 students and I think I was the only freshman. As my classmates settled into seats in the small lecture hall, our professor, Jen, apologized as she placed her cell phone on the podium. She explained that she had to keep it turned on because she a had a flight out of Newark later that day and she needed to keep up on any delays due to the incident in the city.

That was the first that I heard about a plane crash.

This was college in 2001. I had a TV in my room, but it wasn’t hooked up yet. We had the internet, but it was hardwired and most of my time was spent on AIM, not looking at news sites. I had a cell phone but it definitely wasn’t smart. In class, I had a notebook and pen, so there was no way to seek out any more information than what the instructor shared with us. Everyone in class seemed fairly calm. We talked about what had happened for a few minutes and most of us assumed it was just an errant pilot; a tragedy, but nothing more. There were no details available.

So from 9:50-10:30am we continued on with our normal class schedule, discussing women in the current political system. I packed up my bag at the end of class and followed a group of students out of the building. I remember walking back to the dorm, over the Hickman Bridge, listening to people around me say they heard that classes were canceled for the rest of the day. It seemed strange, but I figured I would get details when I made it back to my room.

As I walked into my building, I could sense the panic. The stress and tension in the air hit me like a slap in the face. Girls were walking around crying. A group was huddled around the one television in the back lounge. I walked up the three flights of stairs to my room and immediately saw that my answering machine was blinking wildly. Each message was from my mother, trying to get in touch with me. I grabbed my cell phone, which had been turned off in class, but the call would not go through. “All circuits are busy” was the only response I got when I dialed. Cell phone lines were jammed.

As I kept hitting the redial button, I watched some of my floormates pace up and down the hall. One of the girls walked past my door no less than twenty times in 2 minutes. She was trying to get in touch with her father who worked in the Twin Towers. Others were just trying to find their parents, even if they didn’t work in the city. We all just needed the reassurance of talking to family.

Unable to get through to anyone on the phone, I took my cell phone and walked back downstairs to the lounge where I sat on the couch with my dormmates, staring at the images that were being flashed on every station on our common room TV. No one spoke. We’d only met a few days earlier and suddenly the scariest event of our lives was occurring in the city we thought of as our own. The city.

After a few minutes, I couldn’t watch the news anymore. The news anchors were so unsure and so frightened; they kept showing the same clips over and over and they didn’t have any answers. I hoped I could find out more on the internet.

At 11:00am, I finally got through to my mother (while reloading news sites over and over) who she was relieved to hear from me. She told me you could see flames from the beach by our house and that there was a huge cloud of smoke and a smell enveloping Middletown. She asked if I wanted to come home, and while I considered it, I chose to stay. I wanted to be with my friends, and I admit that the idea of driving home was frightening. None of us knew what was happening or what would happen in the next few hours. It felt safer for us all to stay in one place.

It wasn’t easy, though. The panic in my dorm just increased all afternoon. My friends and I sat in stunned silence, alternating between watching the television coverage and reading each other updates from the internet. At one point, fighter jets flew over campus and people ran for the basement. No one knew what would happen next. Were we at war? That sense of terror was something unimaginable only hours before.

We watched the news for hours on end. I sent IMs and received IMs from friends who were at school in the city, in DC, and across the country. People I hadn’t talked to in months came to mind. I went to a tiny high school, only about 60 in a graduating class, and our network of students was reaching out to one another. We just needed to know that everyone was all right. I remember the anxiety we all felt while we checked on all our Maryland people, friends who went to school near the Pentagon and Washington, DC. Eighteen years old and we were frantically searching for people just to make sure they were still there.

AOL Instant Messenger was our lifeline. Away messages served as life affirmers. Emails were sent back and forth. I will never forget signing on to our high school email network and reading the public announcements, a forum usually reserved for messages about upcoming school dances and PTA fundraisers. The tragedy began to hit home as some of my peers posted messages asking for classmates to look for names on lists- parents, aunts, uncles, siblings, cousins. As each new manifest was posted by the media it became more and more apparent that some of those who were missing would not be coming home that night.

This wasn’t supposed to happen to people you knew…

Later that day, my mother got through to me again, telling me that my brother’s best friend’s dad was missing. That’s when I made a decision. I went home.

I stayed home. School was cancelled for days. We weren’t sure when classes would start again. Most of my floormates went home, too. We didn’t know if we were at war, if terrorists would strike somewhere else in the coming days, if we were safe. Suddenly college didn’t seem that important.

At home, my mother told me how on the morning of September 11th, ferries came from the city to our harbor. Ferries that were based all over NY just packed with passengers from NYC. People who just had to get somewhere besides Manhattan. Ferries would load up and sail to any dock available outside of Manhattan. Passengers stumbled off the boats- people covered in ash, people in shock. They were hosed down immediately by men and women in hazmat suits, for fear that they were carrying biological agents.

Over the next few days, the newspapers talked about how my town, Middletown, was the town in NJ hit the hardest by the tragedy. We lost so many. So many people from my church, people I knew from middle school and high school. Parents, siblings, friends, colleagues all of them. We were a commuter town and every family was touched in some way. Today, Middletown is known as the place that lost the most residents on 9/11 after NYC. There are memorials all over town. There are scholarships and 5K races each year in memory of those who were lost. It’s a constant part of so many lives.

We all grew up that day and our lives changed forever. Safety and security became the most important social and political issues. We take our shoes off at the airport, we arrive 3 hours early, and we still get a little too nervous when flying. But this isn’t new for my students. For them, it’s just the way it’s always been. September 11th is history to them, something they read about each year.

For the first decade or so of my teaching career I had to be careful of what I’ve said on 9/11 because there was always at least one student in the room whose life was touched by the tragedy. In the beginning I taught students who lost parents that day, students whose Laney were first responders or survivors. The. It was grandparents or aunts and uncles. Now? My students were not born when the tragedy struck. If their family lost a loved one, my student most likely never met them.

My current freshmen were born a decade after 9/11. That’s hard for me to comprehend because 9/11 is such a huge part of my life. But for my students, it’s something their parents and other adults talk about. The visual of a plane hitting the towers live on television isn’t part of their life; that’s something I can’t imagine. But for my students, today is September 11th “capital letter because it’s a month,” not September 11th, “a day that changed our lives forever, so it has forever been ingrained in our minds.”

I’ve even seen posts in some teacher groups I am in lamenting the fact that we need to continue talking about this day in schools.  “The kids don’t care, and it happened so long ago. Is it time to let it go?” some posts ask.  Part of me understands that sentiment: we glossed over things like Pearl Harbor Day during my education. But the other part of me remains stunned at the idea of skipping today’s remembrance.  Here in NJ, it’s hard to skip it regardless of your feelings, as our major news stations will run coverage of the ceremonies at Ground Zero, Shanksville, and the Pentagon all morning.

For me, it is hard to fathom not being able to articulate exactly where I was that day, that hour, that minute. While I am glad they have no memory of the terror our nation, especially the tri-state area, experienced that day, it still leaves me stunned. It’s such an integral part of my life that I can’t imagine it not being a cornerstone in others’ lives. Yet I am grateful for that blessing, too. September 11th will always be a day that stops me in my tracks, but I am glad that it’s history for my students. I hope they never experience anything like we all did on that day. But I also hope that they never forget.

We will never forget.
God Bless all those lost on 9-11-01……

In May, the Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford published test score data showing a decline in American students’ standardized test scores. The data show what teachers have long known: students spend too much time on screens and not enough time reading, writing, and thinking. This generation was handed a Chromebook in kindergarten and a cell phone before the end of elementary school, and now we are giving them unfettered access to generative AI. 

Over the last 20 years, I have watched as my students’ willingness to focus on reading and writing dwindled. Very few students arrive in my 9th grade classroom as readers; most tell me they find reading boring. Even fewer are interested in writing.  They do, however, arrive with personal laptops and smartphones. Fueled by constant dopamine hits thanks to unmitigated access to screens, they fail to see the value in difficult tasks like reading and writing.

According to the Pew Research Center, half of American teens spend most of their day online.  I collect cell phones at the beginning of class, and I watch screens light up almost constantly with notifications from social media apps like Snapchat and Discord, text messages from family and friends, pop-ups from games like Cookie Clicker and Fortnite, and even alerts from gambling apps.  Students receive dozens to a hundreds of notifications during a single class.

How can any curriculum compete?

We are starting to see tech remorse from school districts and parents, with schools cutting back on screen time and some parents restricting smartphone access at home. But at the same time, the use of generative AI in schools is increasing. Teachers are told they must use AI in their lessons, and students use AI to complete homework assignments, write essays, or create art (whether they are allowed to or not).  Professional organizations like NCTE (National Council of Teachers of English) and NCSS (National Council of the Social Studies) have partnered with corporations like Google and IBM to promote AI in classrooms.  Despite recent studies showing that generative AI use is detrimental to young minds, those outside the classroom insist it’s the only way forward.  

It isn’t true. 

 K-12 students do not need access to generative AI in school.   

Shae O. Omonijo, PhD candidate and member of the Harvard Innovation Lab, is just one expert who has called for a moratorium on K-12 access to AI.  She points out that the people trying to push AI into schools didn’t learn to code or build apps in school- they learned it at home, through Youtube, hack events, and other informal education spaces.  Why should we treat AI differently? She says, “…by the time they’ll “need it” it’ll be so far advanced that whatever you spent classroom time teaching them will be obsolete.”

It’s time to listen to educators, not edtech companies.  It’s time to listen to the people who spend every day in school with students, not Silicon Valley CEOs with a financial interest in getting children addicted to screens and apps. 

While many people view school as preparation for college and careers, school is not a workplace, and students are not employees. There are use cases for AI in education- data analysis, translation for parent communication, and differentiating reading levels- but in most cases, it should be treated like the single computer I had in my classroom in 2005.  It should help adults; it’s not a thought partner for K-12 students.

Why are we so quick to refer to genAI as a thought partner rather than what it actually is- a probability machine? If we changed the terminology, our perspective on using it with students would be different. You can collaborate with a thought partner because it’s trustworthy (like a human); you use a predictive language machine to see what the most likely arrangement of letters and words might be.

Calling a predictive letter machine a “thought partner” or equivalent anthropomorphized term grants it a level of human trust. Adults struggle to understand that AI tools aren’t the same as interacting with a human, so how can we expect students not to fall into the same trap? If we routinely anthropomorphize tools like Gemini or Claude or GPT, students are less likely to fact-check the output or check it for bias. 

When we treat generative AI as a tool capable of thinking and interacting like a human, students see no reason not to outsource their thinking to the tool. Instead of productively struggling with an academic text, they upload it to a genAI tool and ask for a summary. Instead of using their brains to come up with claims or thesis statements, they are “talking” to genAI and submitting its responses to teachers. They take photos of worksheets and assessments, upload them to genAI, and copy down the answers without thinking. 

And yet we continue to see districts race to be the first to adopt AI into their curriculum.

Why are we gambling with a generation’s capacity to think? So we can be first in the AI arms race?  So students can be prepared to prompt an AI tool that likely won’t even exist when they graduate high school or college?  

If we want American students to be successful adults, they need the freedom to read, write, and think in K-12 classrooms.  Teachers need to be able to challenge students to read and write regularly, to form opinions and communicate with others, and to practice executive function skills such as focus and stamina. GenAI is like a bulldozer that crashes through and dumps the answer in students’ laps. 

Study after study has shown that offloading thinking to AI is overall harmful to children and teens. We know that constant screen time and access to social media are detrimental to young minds, but it is clear that toothpaste can’t be put back in the tube. With genAI, we still have time. 

“But we must make them workforce-ready!” 

Do we? In that case, shouldn’t we be replace English with “Slack and Salesforce for Sophs”? Maybe replace history with “Fun with Teams for Froshies”? GenAI is a tool, just like many workplace tools. Until now, we’ve trusted that students can adapt to employer training because of the skills they learn in K-12 education, not the specialized software covered.

The other argument tech evangelists make focuses on teaching students how to write prompts. Even the draft Working ELA AI Framework from NCTE and Google encourages teachers to incorporate prompting into the curriculum. Yet prompting has changed drastically in the last 18-24 months. It’s like teaching students how to create a Geocities website and telling them HTML will be vital to all careers in the future. 

Our job as K-12 educators is to help students hone their abilities to read, write, and think critically. We have to give them opportunities for friction, for productive struggle, as they move through our classes. They need to feel ownership of their success and failures.

The AI literacy schools should be focusing on is how often genAI is wrong, incomplete, and biased.  It’s not a magic answer machine that can be implicitly trusted.  It’s not even an especially talented creator right now.  

Generative AI should be banned from K-12 classrooms. If newsrooms are banning AI-created content, why are K-12 classrooms embracing it? Why are professional education organizations pushing teachers to use AI with students? We need to hit pause. 

We need time and space to address student privacy and the right to their words.Your classmate or teacher won’t train on your writing or use it without your permission; with genAI, there’s no guarantee student writing will be protected, yet districts are requiring students to upload their writing to these tools for feedback! We’ve seen this script play out before with edtech tools like iReady, which is currently facing lawsuits over student privacy data and collection.Will AI tools face similar lawsuits?

We need time and space to address the effects of AI on young minds. According to Anne Maheux, assistant professor of psychology and neuroscience in the UNC College of Arts and Sciences and Winston Family Distinguished Fellow at the Winston Center on Technology and Brain Development, we are adopting AI at a speed that far outpaces the research being done on its effects.  She points out teens are adopting its use far faster than they adopted the internet and social media, yet we haven’t learned from those experiences.  

Educators and parents must demand a moratorium on genAI tools in K-12 schools. Just like we don’t allow minors to drink, drive a car, or join the army because their frontal lobes are not fully developed, we should protect them from genAI until we better understand its effects. It’s time to hit pause on AI in schools; the money spent on edtech tools can be better spent on purchasing books, field trip experiences, and other tangible items shown to help kids learn. Let them read novels, write stories, and draw pictures. Even if it’s hard, or they think they aren’t good at it, it’s real and it’s theirs.  AI will be there later, when they have a strong foundation in the skills needed to be global citizens.

A few weeks ago, I opened a blank Google Doc to work on a lesson plan and was met with a new reality. There at the bottom of the document, politely asking how it could help, was Gemini, Google’s generative AI tool.  

My 9th-grade students had just completed a comparative literary analysis essay after reading The Tempest and a contemporary book discussed in their book clubs.  Curious, I typed in what I imagine many of them would: I need to brainstorm ideas for an essay comparing The Tempest to the book Just Mercy.

I watched as Gemini flashed through its workflow, from thematic similarities to comparative analysis, quickly producing a four-page document complete with “Core Thematic Intersections” and two essay outlines. I prompted Gemini again, as I know many of them would: produce a 5-6 paragraph draft using Option B. Make sure it sounds like a 9th grade honors student.

In less than ten seconds Gemini responded. “I have drafted a five-paragraph essay based on your selected outline for ‘Option B: Class, Colonialism, and the Law.’ The draft has been placed directly after the corresponding table in your document and includes citations as requested, ” it told me.

There it was, generic but serviceable.  A strategic student would likely run it through a humanizer – a tool that makes AI-generated writing sound more like a human wrote it – and type it again in a new document so it wouldn’t get flagged as AI.  The entire process would require no critical thinking and little effort on their part. They likely wouldn’t learn anything, which might not seem like a big deal until you realize some students are doing this for every assignment, from the smallest discussion post to major assessments.

As a National Board certified teacher who has taught middle and high school English since 2005, I have watched as my students’ ability to focus on reading and writing has dwindled.  Fueled by constant dopamine hits thanks to unmitigated access to screens, their cognitive stamina is almost non-existent.  An October 2025 survey by the College Board confirmed what I see daily: the percentage of high school students who report using GenAI tools for schoolwork increased to over 80% in just a few months during 2025.  In 2026, I watch that continue to grow. Many students fail to see the value in difficult tasks like reading and writing, and they are reluctant to productively struggle through anything that takes longer than a few seconds. They’d rather offload their thinking to tools like Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT.  And the scary thing is, many of them don’t view this as offlading their thinking. Students tell me that “chat just says what I probably would have said.”

We can’t blame students, though.  Generative AI is no longer a tool they must actively seek out or even pay for: it has been directly integrated into the digital infrastructure used by most school districts. It’s built into everything they use, with no way to opt out.  An estimated 170 million students attend schools with Google contracts, and now Gemini is nestled into the Google workspace. The edtech creep that began a decade ago with the mass adoption of one-to-one iPads and Chromebooks has reached a logical, devastating peak.

It’s not just students who feel like they have no choice but to use genAI. Budget-strapped school districts push overworked teachers to use generative AI tools for lesson planning, assessment, and feedback. The professional organizations that should be pushing back, like NCTE (National Council of Teachers of English) and NCSS (National Council of the Social Studies) have become promotional partners, working with tech giants like Google and IBM to promote “AI literacy” by encouraging educators to include prompt engineering in their curriculum. They refer to genAI as a “thought partner” rather than a predictive letter machine, anthropomorphizing the technology to make it more palatable. 

We are rushing towards a dystopian educational trap: students turning in AI-generated assignments that are then graded by district-provided AI software. We are watching humans be removed from the learning process, leaving educators to spend their days playing digital forensic scientist, confronting defensive students and families over schoolwork everyone knows was written by a machine but no one will admit to and no one can prove. No one wins, but we all lose.

Proponents of edtech and the companies that make a living providing digital tools to schools claim we must prepare students for the future by integrating generative AI into the curriculum as early as elementary school. I know middle school teachers who are required to have their students upload writing drafts to genAI tools for “peer” feedback and high school teachers who must include genAI in their history lessons.  But spending class time teaching students how to prompt an AI tool is like teaching them to build a Geocities website in 1999 because “the internet is the future.”  GenAI tools are changing so quickly that anything taught in school is obsolete in a matter of years, or even months.  In the meantime, millions of students will grow up and discover their unfinished drafts were used to train the same tools that wrote them. 

You know what skills don’t become obsolete? The ability to read, write, and think critically. 

A student who can critically think about their word choice can craft a prompt when necessary. They don’t need special training for that. A student who can understand rhetoric and bias won’t be as likely to fall prey to misinformation and AI slop.

An oft-cited MIT Media Lab study from 2025 found that brain connectivity “systematically scaled down” after participants used AI.  Anyone who has spent time with students who regularly use AI can tell you they see those results in the classroom.  We are witnessing the erosion of critical reading, writing, and thinking while districts funnel millions upon millions of dollars to edtech companies.  

Even Randi Weingarten, the AFT president, has called on districts to pause screen use in early grades and rethink AI integration- a surprise from a group that has previously pushed AI integration

It’s time to hit pause on genAI in K-12 classrooms until we fully understand its long-term effects on still-developing brains. AI literacy doesn’t mean learning how to offload our thinking to a machine. True AI literacy for today’s students means teaching them that these tools are often wrong, biased, and flawed. 

We have to preserve the classroom as a refuge for critical thinking. The next time a student opens a blank document and is greeted by Gemini, I want them to close the tool, not because they don’t know how to use it, but because they know they don’t need it. 

Today is the last day of the 2026 Slice of Life Challenge! I’ve been doing this challenge since 2009, which is crazy!

The morning started with a 2-mile walk at the Battlefield followed up by 90 minutes of blow-drying the dogs. Because it’s spring they are shedding a ton. It was nice enough that I could bring the dryer outside and blow out a bunch of their coats. I ended up covered in hair and they hated it, but they should be cooler moving forward.

After that I spent a lot of the day reading. I am on the YA fiction committee for the Green Earth Book Awards and had to finish some reading/rereading. It was a relaxing way to spend the day. I also learned that John Green, one of my favorite authors, announced his first new novel in many years! It will be released in September, so I have to preorder it this week. This will be his first novel for adults.

I still have a week of spring break left which is great. I have more books to read! I also have to catch up on Paradise before I see too many spoilers. But my main focus will be relaxing for the rest of the week!

I checked a few things off my spring break to-do list today. The first thing I had to do was finish collecting the paperwork for my taxes and drop that off at the accountant’s house. After that, I decided to try one of the coffee shops on my list because it was only a few minutes away from where I had to drop off the paperwork.

A Cup of Literature is a new coffee shop in Asbury Park. It’s a combination coffee shop, bookstore, and fitness studio. They sell some books, but they also have a huge bookshelf where you can take a book and leave a book. Next time I go I will definitely bring a few books to leave on the shelf.

The coffee was good, too! They have a bunch of literature-themes drinks to try. I got an iced Study In Salt and Chocolate- a mocha latter with a sea salt maple cold foam. It was a beautiful day, so on the way back to my car I stopped into Rebel Supply Co to look at some vintage clothes. I ended up buying some Kitsch Lisa Frank items because I’m a sucker for nostalgia: I had so much Lisa Frank stuff as a kid!

It was a relaxing day off! I also managed to get three long dog walks in, so I have over 20,000 steps, too!

Things have taken a turn for the better in the other March Madness pool I’m in! Three games to go!

That Duke v. UConn game was incredible. As a millennial who grew up hating Duke, I have to say, “I told you so.” Never trust Duke to win when it counts.

Other than that, today was a normal Sunday. Oh wait- normal except that it’s spring break! That means I don’t have to worry about prepping for school tomorrow! I can sleep in a little bit tomorrow, too!

As for today, I walked the dogs about 5 miles and did my food shopping. Now I’m watching the Gotham v. Pride game. Hopefully, Gotham can break this scoring drought. When it comes to the rest of the week I have a few books I want to finish, some embroidery to do, and some coffee shops I want to visit. I’m not going anywhere during break, but I plan to unplug as much as I can. That will be easier once slice of life is over!

What a great way to start spring break! Last night I grabbed a pair of last minute tickets to Cats: The Jellicle Ball. This is a revival of the classical musical Cats, but it’s also a complete reimagining of the story.

First, it’s important to understand Cats and its influence on people who grew up in the tri-state area in the 90s. The musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber is based on T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats which is about a group of cats called the Jellicles who gather for their annual ball to decide which one will ascend to the Heaviside Layer for a new life.

It makes about as much sense as that sentence.

And if you lived in NJ in the 90s this commercial played constantly. I can still recite it in 2026! It definitely gave some people nightmares.

Cats: The Jellicle Ball completely reimagines the original concept of the musical. It uses the same songs, but it’s set in the underground ballroom scene. The show is pure joy. The dancing and costumes are incredible. They use the entire theater as the stage/runway, which helps immerse you in the show. The story makes a little more sense in this setting, but it’s also Cats, so it’s still weird and theatrical and bizarre in all the best ways. I highly recommend it!

After work I took the dogs for a walk before ordering dinner. Lenten Fridays mean no meat, so tonight’s dinner was fish tacos. We tried a new place, though what I really wanted was Surf Taco. Sadly, the Surf Taco in Jackson closed and the remaining locations are all at least 30 minutes away.

Dinner was good, and now I’m settled in watching basketball. I’m looking forward to a bunch of days ahead with similar plans!

Happy Spring! The flowers are starting to bloom in the yard, and today it was 80° when I got out of school. A more average spring temperature would be nice, but I’m happy to see the flowers.

We have one more school day until spring break! The time between winter and spring break is the longest part of the year because we have so few days off, so everyone is very ready for some time away from the building. I’m not doing anything crazy for break- just enjoying time at home- but I’m ready to forget about work for a few days!

Today was my dad’s birthday, so after rushing home and walking the dogs I headed back across the county to my parents’s house. We had pizza and cake, and it was nice to see my family. I am the oldest of six, and we love all over NJ (and one brother is in Pennsylvania), so we don’t see each other a ton. Everyone except the Pennsylvania sibling and his family was there tonight.

After that, I drove home while listening to a very frustrating Gotham FC game that they lost 2-0. At least it’s a 3-game week, so they can redeem themselves this weekend. Once I got home we watched Abbott Elementary and The Masked Singer. Yes, I love The Masked Singer and never miss a ridiculous episode.

Now it’s definitely time to get a little more sleep than usual. Less than a week left of Slice of Life!