In the last couple of years, as I introduce myself and my class to students, I explain that we will be employing a mode of learning I call “Paper Time.” This is to counter act the ever-deadening effects of hours of “Screen Time.”

To begin, in my first-semester freshman writing class, we read “How to Focus Like it’s 1990.” This NY Times article tracks the declining attention span of Americans, attributing that decline to the way in which so much reading now occurs on screens. The decline in attention (to text) is bad because sustained attention while we read and re-read is how we develop “critical analysis, inference, deduction and empathy.” These are, like, the four most important skills or qualities we can develop as readers, and frankly as humans who inhabit a shared Earth. We discuss how great an advantage it would be to deliberately cultivate our attention spans and hone these skills and qualities, considering how dire the current situation is.

The article notably describes the difference between the type of attention afforded to text when it’s on a screen versus on paper, and it explains that reading on paper is more conducive to re-reading, which is key to the development of these four essential qualities. For this reason, I explain, I require that students read all the class texts on paper. In this particular class, we mostly read articles and chapters excerpted from non-fiction books, so I usually provide students with these readings.¹

To reinforce this lesson, I ask students to take out their phones and take a look at their average daily screen time reports. Most students voluntarily share what they see – and sometimes it’s truly shocking. I had a student once who averaged (AVERAGED!) 23 hours a day on their phone. When asked, she explained that this was because she couldn’t sleep without having YouTube videos playing in the background. Most students will average approximately 8 or 9 hours a day. When they look into the details of how those hours are spent, it’s usually on TikTok or Instagram. Everyone walks away from this experience feeling a lot of alarm.

Incidentally, I also let students scrutinize my phone-use habits. I’ve worked hard over the last few years—by quitting social media and taking anything interesting off my iPhone—to keep my use under an hour a day. I’m usually successful at hitting this goal, though not always. I talk to students about my own struggle to reduce screen time, and we all fantasize together about what we would do with those extra hours if we could wrest back from the phones. No one ever says that they feel great about giving over more than half their waking hours to smartphone apps!

Students in my classes learn that they will be forced off their phones to spend time annotating the readings I assign – looking up every word or concept they don’t know and writing down the definition, summarizing in the margins, and marking passages that they consider important. I show students examples of my own heavy annotation, and I loudly and publicly praise students who come to class showing a lot of ink-based engagement with the readings. Students willingly show one another their annotations, and they start to learn what is possible from one another.

Eventually, I grade the annotations and quiz students on learning any vocabulary. Students often complain at first about this annotation requirement because it slows them down when reading and some are scared about having to memorize definitions, but eventually most get into the habit of it and develop techniques and strategies that they then apply to work in other classes. Some get really into it – buying colorful pens, creating vocabulary lists, and making up their own annotation keys to denote their own markings. Nearly everyone loves it when they start learning the new words – seeing them in other contexts, using them in their own writing, and feeling a sense of command over language.

I am sharing my “Paper Time” strategy here in part because it involves a fun lesson that goes over well in the first weeks of the semester, but also in part because it now provides a great way to counteract the overpowering and overwhelming presence of “AI”-based tools in the classroom.² Social media is no longer the main culprit, stealing away students’ attention. Now, the LLMs are stealing away their cognitive labor, the main activity that used to constitute “education.” What is worse is that first-year college students are already so used to revving up the LLMs to do their work—many spent all of high school on a computer, and some professors actually require that students use LLMs—that when you instruct them to use a piece of paper and a pen, they are actually very receptive to the change. In fact, most students are extremely happy when I explain “Paper Time” to them. They seem to crave this sort of engagement.

This summer, incidentally, I taught an online asynchronous course for the first time since the pandemic. It was rough for many reasons, one of which is that I’ve become so happy teaching in the “Paper Time” mode that basing the course on a screen once again was unpleasant. Creating an online course is extremely difficult and requires a lot of work to do well; it also involves a lot of screen time, which I eschew. I still attempted in various ways to help the students experience the benefits of “Paper Time”: I tried to require that they print out and annotate the readings and upload images of their annotations.³ I also required that they purchase two books (it was a fiction course, after all). There were two assignments that required students to illustrate imagery based on figurative language in the texts. I made an extra credit assignment in which they had to take a selfie while reading an assigned novel – to show off their cozy reading nooks. The results were super cute (one student was sitting at the hair salon, reading with a huge dryer over her head). A few students told me directly that they appreciated these requirements and assignments, but still it was inevitably hard to create a culture of reading and writing on paper in the online, asynchronous classroom. And for sure it was hard to stem the tide of ubiquitous LLM use. I honestly do not believe it is possible in an asynchronous setting.

I have repeatedly said to students and colleagues that I do not feel like I can measure a student’s ability to meet our learning objectives if they try to meet them using LLMs. I am skeptical and even cynical about attempts to offload any of our cognitive labor to the companies that developed these technologies; I am highly resentful of any attempts to sabotage this precious opportunity we have in the classroom to help students develop “critical analysis, inference, deduction and empathy.” (I’m not sure what this means for online education.) Developing these qualities remains the goals of the classes that I teach, and I don’t think that students can do the cognitive work necessary to become sophisticated readers without getting the chance to put down their screens, turn off their LLMs, and put their pens to paper as they read.

1. I do some legwork to take into account the various accommodations students need in order to support “Paper Time.” For instance, I had a student who needed all the texts to be in a really large font in order for her to read them. For her, using screens was a matter of convenience given her need for large text, but she actually preferred reading on paper. When I started giving her large-text versions of the readings, other students also wanted the large-text versions because then they had more room for marginal notes. Eventually, I started giving everyone the large-text versions that semester! In short, sometimes accommodations actually improve life for everyone. And I also don’t think that the accommodations that require disabled students to use their screens are necessarily the ones that the disabled students always prefer. So it’s worth it to have conversations with individuals to figure out what works. ↩︎
2. I put “AI” in quotation marks because the Large Language Model LLM tools such as ChatGPT, Copilot, Claude, etc. are not actually AI. ↩︎
3. Our college provides students with nearly unlimited access to printers, so this is not an unreasonable request, in my opinion. ↩︎