“I believe in an old-fashioned virtue called Doing the Freakin’ Work. Read the book, not the summary. Write the piece, not the prompt. Suffer like the artist you are. It ain’t easy, but if it were easy, it wouldn’t be worth doing.”

Yes, AI is changing things in the corporate world, but let’s be clear: The humans are driving the actual change. McClatchy proves it.

Journalist Natasha Singer reported this story from McPherson, Kansas. It appeared in The New York Times, March 29, 2026

Inge Esping, the principal of McPherson Middle School, has spent years battling digital devices for children’s attention.

Four years ago, her school in McPherson, Kan., banned student cellphones during the school day. But digital distractions continued. Many children watched YouTube videos or played video games on their school-issued Chromebook laptops. Some used school Gmail accounts to bully fellow students.

In December, the middle school asked all 480 students to return the Chromebooks they had freely used in class and at home. Now the school keeps the laptops, which run on Google’s Chrome operating system, in carts parked in classrooms. Children take notes mostly by hand, and laptops are used sparingly, for specific activities assigned by teachers.

“We just felt we couldn’t have Chromebooks be that huge distraction,” said Ms. Esping, 43, Kansas’ 2025 middle school principal of the year. “This technology can be a tool. It is not the answer to education.”

McPherson Middle School no longer gives students their own Chromebooks to use in school and take home. The laptops are now kept in classroom carts and used only for specific activities assigned by teachers.

McPherson Middle School, about an hour’s drive from Wichita, is at the forefront of a new tech backlash spreading in education: Chromebook remorse.

For years, giants like Apple, Google and Microsoft have fiercely competed to capture the classroom and train schoolchildren on their tech products in the hopes of hooking students as lifelong customers. For more than a decade, tech companies have urged schools to buy one laptop per child, arguing that the devices would democratize education and bolster learning. Now Google and Microsoft, along with newcomers like OpenAI, are vying to spread their artificial intelligence chatbots in schools.

But after tens of billions of dollars of school spending on Chromebooks, iPads and learning apps, studies have found that digital tools have generally not improved students’ academic results or graduation rates. Some researchers and organizations like UNESCO even warn that overreliance on technology can distract students and impede learnin

Schools in North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland and Michigan that once bought devices for each student are now re-evaluating heavy classroom technology use. And Chromebooks, the laptops most popular with U.S. schools, have emerged as a focal point. School leaders, educators and parents described the laptop curbs as an effort to refocus schooling on skills like student collaboration and conversation.

“We’re not going back to stone tablets,” said Shiloh Vincent, the superintendent of McPherson Public Schools. “This is intentional tech use.”

The classroom device pullback is the latest sign of a growing global reckoning over how tech giants and their products have upended childhood, adolescence and education.

In a landmark verdict last week, a jury found the social media company Meta and the Google-owned YouTube liable for hooking and harming a minor. More than 30 states have limited or banned student cellphone use at school. Last year, Australia began requiring social media companies to disable the accounts of children under 16, a move that other countries are considering.

Now children’s groups and educators concerned about screen time are turning their attention to school-issued laptops and learning apps. Parents are flocking to support efforts, like Schools Beyond Screens and the Distraction-Free Schools Policy Project, to vet and limit school tech.

At least 10 states, including Kansas, Vermont and Virginia, have recently introduced bills to restrict students’ screen time, require proof of safety and efficacy for school tech tools or allow parents to opt their child out of using digital devices for learning. And Utah recently passed a law that would require schools to provide monitoring systems for parents to see which websites their children had visited — and how much time they spent — on school devices.

Some parents are particularly concerned about YouTube, saying the platform has steered children to inappropriate videos on school devices. Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, a Democrat, recently expressed concern that one of his school-age sons had watched YouTube videos of manosphere podcasters on his school laptop.

“It was his school device,” Mr. Newsom said during a podcast interview this month. “It was YouTube. It was the Chromebook and all these algorithms.

Google said it provided tools for schools to lock students’ Chromebook screens, restrict the content they saw, manage their YouTube access and disable Chromebooks after school hours. The company said it also turned off YouTube by default for K-12 students with school-issued Google accounts.

In a small town surrounded by wheat fields, McPherson Middle School serves sixth through eighth graders in a red brick schoolhouse built in 1938. In science class, eighth graders sit at vintage lab tables next to cabinets brimming with old microscopes. The school auditorium still has its original wooden seating.

“We already have a little bit of an old-school vibe for sure,” said Ms. Esping, now in her fourth year as principal.

She is also revisiting years-old school tech decisions.

In 2016, as part of the national trend, administrators at McPherson decided to buy a $225 Chromebook for every middle schooler. Google had introduced the low-cost laptops five years earlier, with a pitch that the tech would help equalize learning opportunities and equip students with vital career skills.

“The individual use of Chromebooks is a way to empower students to maximize their full potential,” the middle school’s device policy explained in 2016.

School leaders were enthusiastic.

“The general idea was: Students are going to be more engaged because it’s online — and how exciting for them!” Ms. Esping recalled.

To capitalize on the Chromebooks, the middle school invested in online textbooks and learning apps. But administrators, parents and students found that some of the platforms seemed too gamelike or did not work as advertised.

The coronavirus pandemic only increased school reliance on tech tools. In 2021, Chromebook shipments to schools more than doubled to nearly 16.8 million, compared with shipments in 2016, according to Futuresource Consulting, a market research firm.

When Ms. Esping took over as principal in 2022, she worried that rampant tech use was hindering learning. So the school banned student cellphones.

Online bullying and disciplinary incidents quickly decreased, she said. But online distractions continued.

Some students became so hooked on playing video games on their Chromebooks that teachers had difficulty getting them to concentrate on their schoolwork, administrators and teachers said.

Students also sent mean Gmail messages or set up shared Google Docs to bully classmates with comments. Hundreds of children logged on to Zoom meetings where they made fun of their peers, teachers and students said.

The school blocked Spotify and YouTube on school laptops. Then administrators stopped students from messaging one another on school Gmail.

Even then, some educators said they were spending so much time policing student Chromebook use that it was detracting from teaching. Some parents complained their children were spending hours playing video games on their school-issued devices.

Although the idea of taking back students’ Chromebooks seemed unorthodox, given U.S. schools’ deep reliance on Google’s sprawling education platform, the middle school went ahead. The changes took effect in January.

On one recent morning, school formally began with the Pledge of Allegiance, broadcast over school loudspeakers. Homeroom teachers then led group sessions on organizational and interpersonal skills to help children navigate life without their own laptops.

Homeroom topics have included tips for students on using paper planners for school assignments and doing homework during school hours. (Students who want to practice things like extra math problems online can borrow Chromebooks from the school library to take home.)

Teachers have also taught students how to play board and card games like Scattergories and Uno.

The new laptop minimalism has also changed core courses.

During a recent English class on writing thesis statements, Jenny Vernon, the teacher, gave seventh graders a choice. They could answer questions by hand on bright salmon-colored paper or use a class Chromebook. Most students chose the paper.

In a sixth-grade lesson on fractions, a teacher asked the class to convert three-twentieths into a percentage. Students each worked on the problem on small dry-erase boards. They balanced the boards on their heads to indicate they were ready to be called on.

Computer science classes promote purposeful tech use. In one recent lesson, students used Chromebooks to program sensors and LED lights.

“It’s coding the physical world,” said Courtney Klassen, the computing teacher. “It’s not just staring at the screen.”

Some students have welcomed the changes.

Jade LeGron, 13, said curtailing Chromebooks had been “super beneficial” because students had stopped fighting with teachers over video games and had less opportunity “to be mean to each other.”

Sarah Garcia, also 13, said spending less time online had prompted students to talk more. “Since we don’t have our Chromebooks in front of our face,” she said, “most people now interact with their, like, peers and stuff.”

The school is part of a trend. In Wichita, Marshall Middle School is trying “tech-free” Fridays. In January, the Kansas Senate introduced a school device bill that would prohibit laptops and tablets in kindergarten through fifth grade — while restricting device use for middle schoolers to just one hour during the school day.

Schools like McPherson say they are not just curbing Chromebooks to reduce children’s screen time. They are also aiming to refocus learning on child development, student-teacher interactions and old-fashioned fun.

“They’ve learned how to make darts again!” Ms. Esping exclaimed, pointing up at a student-made dart jutting out from a school hallway ceiling. “They are going back to the old ways of being ornery.”

If you know me at all, you know I love food. I mean, I love food. I love eating it, I love making it, I love learning about it, I love eating it (I said that twice). Like dance, like reading and writing, it is one of the main joy-bringers of my life. As with dance, as with reading and writing, I get high on it. Figuratively, you understand; I’m not talking about special brownies. I am actually, though, talking about regular brownies, or a sourdough pizza with burrata, or—now I started thinking about cheese—parmigiano reggiano, you know the kind I mean, the stuff from Modena that Massimo Bottura says runs through his veins (I believe him). Dance, literature, art, whatever it is for you, it could be anything, swimming, travel, whatever: these things we do that make our eyes light up, or occasionally even tear up, that we look forward to and turn to, and that transport us. We engage with them and think, “Fine. Whatever kind of tedium or misery or worse is happening out there, it’s FINE as long as there is this in the world”—really good food is one of those things for me. It is one of those things that has resonated throughout my life, and at times left me in certain ways, and come back.

You know those things? Whatever it is that speaks to your soul (you will note the impossibility of speaking this way about the artifice of artificial intelligence, as souls are one of many things machines don’t have) and called to you as a child, and you couldn’t explain why. You may have followed that spark all the way into a career, or you may not even have cause to ever pause and remember it, or maybe you traveled a path somewhere in between. When I was a child on a health store visit with my dad, I didn’t know why it felt so meaningful to hold the jar of honey with the comb still in it; he told me it came straight from the hive, but I’d never seen it in the jar before. It was something alive and mysterious. I didn’t know why, baking cookies with my mom, I felt such wonder watching the flour mix into the rest of the batter, the moment it turns into an actual dough and you can see it happen. And you’re about a second away from grabbing the beater (we called them lickers!) and licking every last dollop off of it. It was something created and transformed. I didn’t know the meaning in these moments. But I knew there was a deep-running joy there. Wonder and mystery—human experience, embodied delight.

It’s been so fun to see these particular aspects of my childhood come back around. I did not become a cook, or any kind of culinary professional, so it’s a beautiful thing to find a meandering return to these sustaining practices, not just in devouring the results, but in creating them. And to remember that they always meant this much, and to give words to that. There’s a converse way of stumbling into deep meaning, one that isn’t holding on, remembering, and revisiting, but the opposite: letting go of things that meant a great deal to you and making room for something entirely new. Perhaps you were a swimmer or a surfer, and loved it and at some point got injured and had to let go of it. It doesn’t matter what the thing was, you see. Perhaps you thought of food as one of your main anchors, and at some point your gut biome forced a change so drastic that you had to completely revamp your entire frame of mind around it, which was frightening and saddening, because the things we really love become avenues for meaning and identity, for better or worse. And then, perhaps, one day, you found a return. You caught a wave of a different kind, in a different ocean, or taught someone else to. You found that some of the things you had loved most and thought you might never have joy from again came back to you in the most surprising and fulfilling ways, because of that very journey. I suppose there is a profound message here about pain and letting go, and how we can’t see the whole picture all at once, and the idea that, like everything human, holding on and letting go are not opposites but are different sides (or guides) of the same coin, leading us ultimately toward a central path.

These are more ideas that a machine never has to worry about.

I wanted to write about food in this way, both as giver of meaning and as a symbol of growth between childhood and adulthood in my own life, a forsaker and a returner, because I think food is one of the best vehicles we have to talk about being human. In this truly terrible technological moment—I am not talking about advances in healthcare and lifesaving breakthroughs; I am talking about any kind of machine activity that uses language with a pretense of humanity—in this truly terrible technological moment, human activity is the only activity worth engaging. To be human has always been sacred. To do the things that make us human now is doubly sacred: in and of themselves, and as acts of recognition and awareness of that sacredness. Make sourdough: as an act of love for your body and your friends and family, and as a remedy against the ills of non-embodied life. Yes, I think that making a loaf of bread from scratch is part of the fight against every “AI Overview” that shows up on your screen, working to make you stupider, lazier, less whole, more one-sided, less active and curious and ready for struggle, and, above all, less capable of deploying your own self-sustaining and real-world community-given powers.

Perhaps you have let go of what used to bring you joy and found new joys. Perhaps you have circled back around, with delight, to something that always carried a spark for you. “The end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time,” said T.S. Eliot, in his characteristically shiver-sending way. Or maybe you’re at neither point at the moment. To be human is to long. To be human is: to eat, to think, to feel, to create, to move, to suffer, to love … to long. To be involved in a consciousness, a singularly meaningful one, that belongs only to us yet relates us to the vast cosmos. To be aware, sometimes agonizingly, sometimes exhilaratingly, of our existence in time. “‘In fact … you’re claiming the right to be unhappy,’” Aldous Huxley famously recognized of the poor little humans in Brave New World. All of this, and more. We have to remember that the things that really make us human, the deepest points of definition here, that soul we mentioned above, are the ones we will never be able to say, because they are mysteries. And mystery, and therefore meaning, is the opposite of machine—machine, which is, in the most literal sense, dehumanizing.

We know what a machine, any machine, is for, because we made it. We don’t know what we are for. That’s it, friends. A mystery in our telos (in our ultimate end and purpose, because of the mystery in our beginning), which no matter how hard the bots try to explain, they will never, thank goodness, be able to. Therein lies the whole point. To be aware fully of the point would, in part, remove it. “Our true home is wilderness, even the world of every day,” the great American philosopher Henry Bugbee sought to remind us, with no small degree of gratitude. You can’t know why you’re here, in the larger sense, as much as you hunger to. This hunger: impossible for a machine. But you can know some of those smaller points of meaning, the ones that speak to you, the ones that feed and nourish you.

And you know you have to eat.

Every week, as AI’s capabilities and influence grow, the number of articles and people disgusted with it grows, too. This disgust has taken too long (it should have started over two decades ago when Facebook weirdly dropped into college life), but it’s a trend we have to sustain. I do not want a sense of “digital belonging,” as the workplaces frame it these days. In fact, I think this phrase should frighten anyone with eyes and ears and a brain. The place we need to belong is Earth, where we live in the flesh. The question is no more complicated and no less terrifying than whether you want to be a human or an avatar. Paul Kingsnorth, God bless him, has brought us “Artists Against AI,” “Writers Against AI.” We know that whatever AI can do, in the end, doesn’t matter at all. Only being human matters, and a machine will never be human because it cannot sustain mystery, by definition. And it cannot sustain meaning. It cannot sustain at all, because it is divorced from the very idea of sustenance. So I’ve started thinking that Food (real food) is Against AI, as well. Make food. Feed your body. Feed your cells and your soul. The mystery of a sourdough starter, fermenting, decaying in order to create a new rise, or of the perfect solution surrounding the honeycomb, both from the Earth, where we live—start there.

Image Credit: Jehan Georges Vibert, “The Marvelous Sauce” (c1890)

There’s a principle of learning that I find important but also hard to articulate. It sounds something like, “we learn what we think about, so we should get students to think hard about important ideas.” Or, “learning is more durable when students think about the deep structure of a concept rather than its surface structure.” Or, “learning works best when students make connections between concepts and think about the meaning of what we want them to learn.”

One term cognitive scientists use to describe this type of thinking is “elaboration.”

The vast majority of teachers I’ve met understand this idea intuitively. We want students to think about big ideas. Walk into a random classroom and you might find teachers asking hard questions, prompting students to dig deeper.

A Non-Example

The hard part of elaboration questions isn’t the questions themselves. The hard part is getting every student thinking about the questions.

Here is a non-example.

One practice I’ve seen recommended in this general direction is for students to create their own problems. Teach a topic, then ask students to write their own problems. Maybe they trade with a partner, or we write them on the board and solve them together. The logic looks like this: generating problems involves deeper processing than solving problems, so it will cause students to think more deeply about what they are learning.

That’s probably true! Here’s the catch: when I’ve used this strategy I find that some students are able to generate their own problems, while others stare at me with blank expressions unsure of where to start.1

There are two key qualities of a good elaboration question: first, it should require effortful thinking. Second, it should cause as many students as possible to do that thinking. Below are some examples of my favorite elaboration questions. These are my favorite because, in my experience, they are the best questions for getting reluctant students to engage with this type of thinking.

Elaboration Questions

Find the pattern

Give students a sequence of problems with some sort of repetition that reveals a pattern:

• Find 10% of 200.

• Find 25% of 200.

• Find 3% of 200.

• Find 4% of 200.

• Find 6% of 200.

• Find 60% of 200.

• Find 80% of 200.

Then ask: what patterns do you notice?

We can talk about the patterns, we can make predictions about new problems using those patterns, and we can extend the pattern in different directions — maybe finding percents of 300 or 400 to see what happens next. There’s a ton of math here. Students are practicing percents, while also creating an opportunity to think hard about why percents do what they do.

Expansion

Here is a sequence of problems that get gradually harder:2

• 5 pounds of cheese cost $50. How much does one pound cost?

• 2 pounds of cheese cost $8. How much does one pound cost?

• 3 pounds of cheese cost $11.40. How much does one pound cost?

• 3 pounds of cheese cost $12. How much does one pound cost?

• 3 pounds of cheese cost $6. How much does one pound cost?

• 2 pounds of cheese cost $6. How much does one pound cost?

• 1 pound of cheese costs $6. How much does one pound cost?

• 0.5 pounds of cheese costs $6. How much does one pound cost?

• 1/2 of a pound of cheese costs $6. How much does one pound cost?

• 1/3 of a pound of cheese costs $6. How much does one pound cost?

• 2/3 of a pound of cheese costs $6. How much does one pound cost?

The goal here isn’t that every student solves every problem. The goal is to increase the difficulty gradually, figure out where students get stuck, and use that information to help students learn something new. I often find that when I sequence questions in this way, students can solve much harder problems than if I just throw out the problem cold.

What If?

Students solve a problem, or we solve a problem together. We leave the solution visible, on paper or on the board.

Then I ask what if — here’s an example.

We solve the equation: 2x + 1 = 11.

What if the equation was -2x + 1 = 11?

The exact questions here will depend on what your students know and don’t know. This is a great way to get students thinking hard if they’re reasonably confident with the first equation, confident multiplying negatives, but don’t have much experience with negatives in equations.

Non-Examples

Students solve a problem, or we solve a problem together. Then I ask a question that is a deliberate contrast with the last problem, where students might overgeneralize a rule.

First question: distribute

2(3x + 10y - 5z)

Next question: distribute

2(3x + 10y) - 5z

A non-example helps to avoid the problem of going on autopilot, copying an example without considering the structure of that example. It often leads to great conversations!

Stepping Back

The last few examples of elaboration questions all have something in common. They are all designed to get students solving one problem or several problems accurately before doing some deeper thinking. That’s a great general strategy to get students thinking hard about elaboration questions: build confidence with a few things students know how to do, and then use that confidence as a springboard to tackle tougher questions. The details here will depend on your students. The initial questions need to be ones students can solve confidently, and the leap you’re asking students to make needs to be accessible but not too easy.

Ok, back to a few more examples.

Sentence Completion

Writing in math class can feel like a pain. I could say a lot more about this, but for this post I have one go-to teaching move to get students writing about math.3 Here’s what it looks like:

Complete the sentence:

To find the surface area of the prism, Lin found the areas of the three rectangles, added them, and multiplied by 2. She multiplied by 2 because…

This is one of those things students end up doing without really understanding. “Oh yea, I multiply by two for those problems…” Sentence completion is the best way I’ve found to get students thinking and writing about the why, without getting a bunch of blank stares and blank papers in response.

Numberless Word Problems

Word problems are a pain. This could also be a much longer post. But the short version: a good way to get students thinking hard about word problems is to take away the numbers. Without numbers, students can’t just grab numbers, smush them together with an operation, and move on. You can do this by covering up the numbers in a problem you already use, or writing your own. An example might look like this.

A runner jogs one lap around a circular track. How far does the runner jog?

Then, prompt students. What do you need to know to answer the question? What would you do with that number if I gave it to you? What if I gave you the radius instead?

Elaboration Questions

You can call these whatever you like. I’m partial to “elaboration questions” because it’s concise but you might like something different. You also might have lots of other strategies that work well! Let me know what works for you.

The key idea I want to emphasize: the goal of elaboration questions is not to get a handful of students thinking hard. The goal is to get every student, or as close as possible, thinking as hard as possible. Some of the examples I gave might seem simple. That’s often the case! We are teachers. We know a lot more than our students. It’s easy to overestimate what students know, ask a bunch of hard questions, and get a lot of blank stares in response. My priority when I ask elaboration questions is to get as many students thinking as I can. These strategies are the best tools I’ve found to do so. Even questions that seem simple on the surface can work well when we scaffold and sequence them in ways to get every student thinking.