The Pendulum and the Crossfire

After twenty-three years as an educator, the end of the school year is always one of my favorite times in the classroom. It is deeply bittersweet, and I love it for that reason. I’ve always believed that the sweetness of life is enhanced by the bite of hard work, sustained effort, and deep investment.

This year, however, the bittersweetness feels a little different.

For the past nine months, I have been building a life in a new community, in the lovely city of Portland. While I love it here, stepping into these classrooms is a stark contrast to the school where I spent the first two decades of my career, a place where I taught the younger siblings (and sometimes the parents) of my students, and where my colleagues were my dearest friends and greatest sources of inspiration.

But being in a new location provides new curriculum for my brain. I am experiencing my own bittersweetness of a summer well-earned and hard work endured.

However, that personal transition is not the true tale I want to share today.

Having observed students for over two decades, I have been in this profession long enough to recognize the deeper trends in education. In my experience, trends in the classroom are never isolated; they are reflections of our broader societal trends and our collective values.

Right now, as a society, we can all feel that we are standing on the cusp of massive change. Economic uncertainty, the relentless distraction of social media, and the looming presence of AI dominate our minds. I am not entirely sure how aware our teenagers are of these issues, but I know they are living at the effect of them.

Watching students wrestle with big ideas, and watching teachers navigate this rapidly shifting landscape, one thing is glaringly clear: the future of our society--our current students--are caught in the crossfire.

On one side, you have teachers desperately fighting to protect academic integrity, trying to ensure that students are actually doing their own thinking in the age of chat bots. On the other side, students are quietly losing access to foundational resources. They are navigating overcrowded classrooms with unfair student-to-teacher ratios, and battling a severe lack of special needs services.

And then, there is the technology paradox- ugh!

Because digital distraction and screen time have become such pervasive problems, the educational pendulum has started to swing backward. The research is clear enough: learning, memory retention, and physical handwriting are strongly correlated. After years of screen overuse, the return to handwriting in the classroom is certainly welcome.

But I also wonder: Has the pendulum swung too far?

Recently, in an 11th-grade classroom at least half of the students did not know how to format an essay in MLA style (a skill that used to be a standard requirement in middle school).

Beyond that, the simple act of double-spacing a typed document was entirely beyond their technical capabilities. In our rush to pull them away from the screens and protect their cognitive focus, we have inadvertently allowed their basic digital literacy to atrophy. Will they need these skills in the future? Is digital literacy dead?

Am I just waxing nostalgic for a bittersweet time from my past? A time when the struggle to master both technology and foundational learning paid off in future gains?

Perhaps. But as we navigate this new era of education, we have to find a way to honor the hard work of the past while preparing them for the reality of the future. The sweetness of their (and society’s) success depends on it.