You never know the impact of childhood experiences

Lake View gravel pits, 1959

Last weekend, I biked the Sakatah Trail from the small town of Elysian to Sakatah State Park, just east of Waterville here in Minnesota. It is a lovely, mostly flat and shaded path, that took me not just past sloughs and lakes and fields of corn, but through memories as well.

When I was a boy, my dad took the family to visit some old Iowa neighbors who had moved to Minnesota. They were living on a farm on Long Lake in the western part of the state. The farm, as I recall, had the usual old farm house, out buildings, and a barn. But what made it remarkable to me was that it sat on a lake. And there was a dock with a boat tied to it right behind the barn. Those lucky people could jump off the dock anytime they wanted! It was then that I decided I wanted to have a house on a lake.

Much of my boyhood summers were spent with my grandmother and aunt in Lake View, Iowa. While their small house, hand built by my grandfather, did not sit on the shore of Blackhawk Lake, it was only a ten minute (hands-free) bike ride to public Crescent Beach. Although my aunt railed about how filthy the lake water was, we as kids loved it, taking swimming lessons there, playing in the sand, and diving off the two platforms just outside the swimming area - one high and one low. Friends and I would dive to the muddy bottom of the lake and bring up clams. Whether it was on Blackhawk Lake, in the nearby gravel pits where we would swim as a family Sunday afternoons, or in the dredge ditch near the farm where we lived, no time was better spent than in the water.

Happily, I have been able to spend much of the past 25 or so years living my dream of living on water. I’ve had three houses (well, one was a trailer house) on nice sized lakes and my current townhouse sits on a small pond. While the pond will not support a pontoon boat, it offers many of the pleasures of a larger body of water - birds and turtles to watch and the serenity of small waves.

Had my father not taken our family to Minnesota would I still have wanted to live on water? Perhaps. The trip was one I have long remembered fondly, spurred by last Sunday’s bike ride beside some beautiful Minnesota lakes. Which leads me to wonder what experiences I may have given my own children and grandchildren that they may long think about and even influence their aspirations. Might the trip with my daughter to China when she was a teenager instill a love of travel? Might the bike rides I did with my son along the Red Jacket Trail lead to a love of outdoor exercise? Might the Scout trips to the Boundary Waters and Philmont with my grandsons help them imbue the values they learned in Scouting? Or might being drug behind Grandpa’s pontoon boat on a rubber tube make them want one day to have a house on a lake themselves?

Don’t just experience life. Share your experiences with others. You may never know the impact.

Why I don’t use AI to help me write

Image source: https://www.instagram.com/p/B9zsjbZHQVz/ 

Writing destroys memory and weakens the mind, relieving it of work that makes it strong. Writing is an inhuman thing.  - Plato (500BC)

The scholars who study writing and cognition are rarely reflexively opposed to AI. Many have spent decades anticipating a leap in computer-assisted writing, just like the one we are living through. They tend to be excited by the technology’s potential.

Still, their work casts doubt on the tech-industry push to embed AI at every stage of the student writing process, from brainstorming to drafting to revising. Research shows that traditional, unassisted composition is valuable, not despite its difficulty, but because of it. Writing builds our working memory, executive planning skills and metacognition — the ability to think about our thinking, weigh alternate viewpoints and revise for clarity and style. It takes decades to develop writing skills, from toddlerhood into adulthood.

“Writing is a technology for thinking,” Kellogg said. WHAT DO STUDENTS LOSE WHEN THEY STOP WRITING? Dana Goldstein, New York Times, 8/23/26

I often think about Plato’s quote above - the irony of the now long-valued "tech" - writing - was once considered a detriment to thinking. And now new AI tools for writing are posing the same conclusion Plato reached 3000 years ago. 

I have loved writing all my life. Both personally and professionally. And that may be why I am so very, very reluctant to turn any part of the process over to AI. I am an imperfect being. So my writing has imperfections as well. But as Leonard Cohen sings, "There is a crack, a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in." Perfection in writing or in physicality is rather boring. Would AI in eliminating my errors, might it also be eliminating me?

As a secondary English teacher (many years ago, before personal computing, word processing, spell checking, etc), I divided my student writing assignments into four categories:

• Explanatory: Write instructions and why something may be important (How to change the oil in your car.)
• Descriptive: Write about what something does in a way others can understand it. (How does oil in a car impact its maintenance and how do you tell if it is done properly.)
• Argumentative: Write the pros or cons of a position. (List three reasons why regular oil changes are in the car owner’s best interest.)
• Creative: Write in a way which is personal and original that increases the impact of the writing. (Tell a story about something regarding automobiles that you find memorable in an engaging way.)

The case can be made for using AI to help the writer with the first three categories of writing. Skill with prompts and good review of the accuracy of the final product would still be necessary.

Creative writing, however, may well best be left to we carbon-based lifeforms. As I alluded to above, creative writing is about new ways of looking at the world, ways that may have rough edges, some contradictions, even exaggerations. Creativity is about solving problems or transmitting messages more effectively in new ways. (See Teaching Outside the Lines.) Which also means creativity can play a positive role in each of the first three categories of writing too.

I certainly recognize that my own writing “voice” is imperfect at best. I’ve never re-read something I’ve written to which I have not wanted to make some changes. And tomorrow, that will include this post. But I ask myself if I have ever read a “perfect” piece of writing.

And the pendulum swings back…

 

From St. Paul to Minnetonka, new parent-led groups advocating for limited technology use have formed to urge changes. Their demands come after noticing worrying behaviors in their children, reports of technology distractions in the classroom and state test scores struggling to recover after the COVID-19 pandemic. 

The pushback comes after years of “one-to-one” technology programs that placed a device in the hands of nearly every student in a district. The launch of one-to-one programs was an innovative step in public education when they first rolled out in Minnesota schools from 2011 to 2013. Devices like iPads and Chromebooks were issued to each student throughout every grade level and were intended to prepare students for the workforce, higher education, coding and other creative outlets provided by technology. 

Now, communities are confronting both the pitfalls of technology in classrooms and the fact so much curriculum relies on coming from a screen or software. “Screen time overload: parents say kids pay the price”. Grace, Ava, Minnesota Star Tribune, August 4, 2026

     For over forty years, I advocated for technology to be used purposefully in K-12 classrooms. My experience started in about 1980 when the West Branch, Iowa school board decided to use my library book budget to purchase a single Apple II computer with a green screen monitor, a single 5 ¼ inch floppy drive, and a dot matrix printer. The board felt every school building should have at least one computer.

     So instead of processing new books for my junior high library during teacher prep days, I taught myself how to use AppleWriter. (I am hoping my memory is serving me correctly.) I fell in love with it. While I was a good writer, I was a poor speller. Editing meant typing an entire work over again. Worksheets and tests on ditto masters had to be edited by scraping away the carbon copy. (The smell, however, did get me through more than a day or so.) 

     I realized that if this technology could benefit me, it would also benefit many, if not all, the seventh graders I was teaching the part of my day that I was not being a librarian. I also helped the principal use VisiCalc and other teachers use the computer. The kids were delighted to come to the library after school to play Eamon and Oregon Trail and Lemonade Stand.

     But at the time, the regular classroom had no tech to speak of. 16mm projectors were wheeled in as needed. The only telephones were in offices and one communicated via intercom. The staff lounge had an electric typewriter (and ashtrays). Oh, those were the days.

     By the time I retired as technology director of a school district with about 12,000 kids in 2016, the 1:1 Chromebook ratio was firmly in place, along with staff development helping teachers use the devices purposely. We had home communication networks for parents to help monitor their kids’ progress. We checked out hotspots for homes without internet. We offered ebooks and other digital educational resources for all grade levels.

     Did we go too far? 

     Virtual education due to COVID, the ubiquity of smartphones, and a drop in measured student academic performance have all impacted the public perception of technology use by kids. AI is putting the fear of God into many adults. Each day I am grateful these things all happened AFTER I retired.

     As a grandparent, I too am concerned about the percentage of time my grandsons spend online and feel somewhat guilty about enabling them when they were quite young by letting them play Captain Underpants on my home computer and by purchasing them iPads when they first came out around 2010.

     I suppose it is good that pendulums swing rather than stay stuck forever in a single position. Were I still a tech director, I would not be advocating for more tech use but for better tech use. I still believe that the people who can use technology to enhance their own skills will be more likely to succeed in the future. I still believe that technology should be used to personalize education to suit each individual user. And I still believe technology can make learning more engaging, more enjoyable, and more effective.