English Teacher in Texas Makes Students ‘Write It Down And Make It Plain’ In Fight Against AI

Chanea Bond is open to reconsidering her anti-AI stance but remains focused on building fundamentals skills using analog skills.

As schools nationwide experiment with artificial intelligence, one Texas teacher is taking a deliberately analog approach in her classroom, arguing that foundational skills matter more than early exposure to AI tools.

Chanea Bond, an English teacher at Southwest High School in the Fort Worth Independent School District, has removed most digital technology from her American literature and composition classes. Bond now requires students to write nearly everything by hand. Though students are issued individual laptops, they do no good in her classroom.

“If you walk into almost any one of my classes today, you will see that all of my students are handwriting,” Bond told NPR. “They are journaling, and they are constantly and consistently doing everything with a pen or a pencil.”

Rather than grading only final essays or presentations, Bond evaluates each stage of the writing process, including thesis statements, outlines, bibliographies, and handwritten drafts.

“The steps matter to the cumulative overall grade because that’s how I know that the thinking is happening,” she said. “I think a student is less likely to turn in something that is written by AI if they’ve had to show me the beginning, the middle, and the end, and the different pieces that go into it.”

Bond said she is open to reconsidering her stance but remains focused on fundamentals.

“A lot of people say to me: ‘Aren’t you afraid that they’re going to get behind?’” she told NPR. “And my response is: ‘I know that when my students leave my class that they know how to think and they know how to write.’”

Bond’s concerns align with growing research and educator warnings that the rampant classroom use of artificial intelligence assists in weakening reading comprehension and critical thinking.

A 2024 analysis published in the peer-reviewed journal Societies found a negative correlation between frequent AI tool use and critical thinking performance, attributing the decline in part to cognitive offloading, or the tendency for students to rely on automated systems rather than engage in sustained reasoning and problem solving.

Education researchers cautioned that when students outsource drafting, summarizing, or analytical tasks to AI, they lose opportunities to practice the mental processes required for comprehension, synthesis, and original thought.

Similar concerns were raised by The Hechinger Report, which documented how teachers nationwide are seeing students skip close reading and struggle to explain their reasoning after using generative AI tools for assignments.

Educators highlighted in the study said AI usage can bypass productive struggle needed for growth. Bond agrees, making sure her students do not “outsource that level of [critical] thinking.”