“It’s just so humiliating,” my daughter said one day as she pulled a handful of wrinkled slips of paper from her school backpack. “Everyone else fills in the little half sheet of paper. By the time I get out my Chromebook, they’re all done. They have to wait for me. It’s not worth it.”
When my children were young, I taught them all cursive writing in second grade. But this child is dyslexic and dysgraphic. She could copy sentences in cursive beautifully. She could compose complex, intricate stories and narrations if I scribed for her. But, if she had to compose and handwrite at the same time, her output was laborious and meager, almost illegible, and riddled with spelling and grammar and mechanical errors. Nevertheless, she is a talented writer. Dysgraphia is a baffling neurobiological difference.
In high school she had keyboarding accommodations allowing her to type all her written assignments, which was a game changer. Using a keyboard, she was able to write in a way that she simply couldn’t by hand. But school wasn’t really set up for students like her. Her days were filled with quick written quizzes and short in-class assignments. Many times, depending upon the environment the teacher had created in the classroom, she was too embarrassed to use her keyboard in these low stakes, fast-paced situations and just chose to write her quizzes like everyone else.
It drove me batty! She’d regularly get only half credit because her answers were predictably messy and insufficient. Although she could type a paragraph, she could only handwrite a few words. Too many teachers thought she was lazy, not trying. In class discussion, it was clear she had done the work and had lots to say, but those daily lost points added up, always knocking her grade down at least half a grade each semester.
From our perspective, the trend toward greater use of laptops in the classroom was a relief. If everyone was taking the quiz on their Chromebook, then her keyboarding accommodations were less stigmatizing. It was a welcome, but ironic shift. We had fought so hard to secure these accommodations, paying out of pocket for the professional evaluations needed to acquire them, and soon after she got them, everyone and everything was going digital. It seemed this change would make dysgraphia much less of an obstacle to academic success in high school and college.
But change is constant. Today, we are witnessing a new push to ban screens from classrooms altogether. Many states have banned cell phones and the next frontier is a push to remove individual laptops as well. The language is dire. Jessica Grose wrote in a 2024 New York Times column entitled, “Get Tech Out of the Classroom Before It’s Too Late,” that we risked being unable to “draw back the brain space of our nation’s children.” Bestseller Jonathan Haidt wrote of the “great rewiring of childhood.” The warnings have been articulated in the language of emergency. The mere existence of digital technologies in the classroom threatens the well-being of our children, creating a lost generation of addicted youth. While Grose wisely calls for us to “roll back the excesses,” the response among some educators to this “our children are in danger” framing has not been a nuanced rolling back but rather a romantic nostalgia for a traditional tech-free, chalk-and-talk schoolhouse.
The growing panic over AI cheating is exacerbating this trend. The solution, we are told, is tech-free classrooms, in-class written assignments, mini-whiteboard responses, and a return to blue-book exams.
I understand the fears. Unfettered access to social media can be addictive and emotionally harmful to children. Parents don’t want their children looking at screens all day. Big tech educational apps have been uncritically adopted in too many classrooms. Generative AI is a “here be dragons” unknown frontier.
But devices and technologies are also tools, tools that can change the trajectory of academic success for dyslexic students.
Audiobooks are indispensable for dyslexic students. Decoding fluency takes longer for these kids and it is impossible for them to read as widely in the elementary years as fluent decoders do. Academic success depends upon exposure to what Maryellen MacDonald calls “book language,” the rich vocabulary and syntax found in books and not so much in spoken conversation. At the same time my seven-year-old niece was engrossed in reading Harry Potter books, my nearly seven-year-old daughter could barely read Bob Books. Undeterred, she carried around thick hardback copies of Harry Potter while she listened to audio versions on her Ipod. Even when they reached high school, my dyslexic teenagers still combined audio versions of assigned texts with their paper copies.
There are also a wide variety of apps that are helpful for dyslexic students —digital learning apps, typing apps that teach crucial keyboarding skills, apps that turn worksheets into digital documents, reading and scanning pens, voice to text apps, as well as grammar and spell check programs. Digital exams are essential for students with handwriting difficulties, and laptops and mind-mapping software can make note-taking possible for these students. Whole school programs like google classroom ease the organizational strain of tracking homework and due dates for students who struggle with executive function.
All these assistive technologies address obstacles that have made school difficult for dyslexic children. What are we saying to the dyslexic student when we take away the very things that have put academic success within their grasp? The traditional schoolhouse wasn’t a romantic idyll for everyone. We know what happened to dyslexic kids in these traditional settings. They failed; they dropped out; they were channeled into non-academic pursuits. The traditional schoolhouse was a rigid model that didn’t bend to make school accessible for differently-wired students.
Increasing accessibility has been a good thing. While too many students are still falling through the cracks, students with learning disabilities are attending and graduating from high school and college at a higher rate than in past decades, and the legal structures set out by the ADA require they be accommodated.
But accommodations not only remove obstacles for differently-wired students, they also teach more typically-learning students and teachers important lessons about tolerance and diversity and making room for people who learn differently. They model kindness and generosity. They expand our collective imaginations.
Teachers and students frequently do not realize their own biases. My middle daughter had to fight her way into an AP Seminar class at her high performing public high school. She knew the format of the class played to her strengths, but her history teacher would not recommend her. And, once in the class, she was routinely down-graded for her spelling, grammar and mechanics struggles. Many teachers unconsciously associate neatness and spelling with intelligence, and our assumptions cloud our judgements. My daughter barely eked out a B in a class where most of her classmates made As. Yet, when it came time to take the AP exam, her divergent, creative thinking and complex arguments resulted in one of the very few scores of 5 in the entire class.
Computers and other devices are tools, often essential tools for dyslexic students. Their presence as a normal part of a classroom has been liberating for many neurodivergent students, reducing stigma and unnecessary obstacles to learning. So, as we think about how to best manage these tools, let’s remember that banning them completely, vilifying them as nothing but harmful, is itself a harm. The backlash against tech is morphing into a backlash against accommodating neurodivergence.
There is a nuanced discussion to be had about age and grade and type and amount of technology in the classroom, but simply returning to some nostalgic version of a tech free classroom is neither nuanced nor ethical. Traditional classrooms have long been inhospitable spaces for dyslexic students. Let’s not repeat that flawed history and toss our neurodivergent kids out along with the computers.