I Got Rid of Typed Papers and Bought My Students Notebooks Instead

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Ayşe Baltacıoğlu-Brammer, an assistant professor of history and Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

I’ve had a no-tech policy in my classroom for years now.

But after I realized AI was creating a trust problem between my students and me. I decided to take it a step further.

At the start of this semester, I bought my students $1 notebooks from Amazon. Instead of submitting typed papers online, they are journaling by hand to analyze what they’re reading.

My no-tech classroom predates the AI acceleration

Around six years ago, I told my students that laptops and tablets weren’t allowed in my class, unless they had an accommodation from the university.

I was seeing lots of students distracted by the screens in front of them — messages, links, emails, and notifications were popping up, taking them elsewhere mentally.

I realized that having no laptops in the classroom was making a huge difference. My students were finally paying attention.

The feedback was positive too. In anonymous comments from students evaluating the course, I’ve had numerous responses along the lines of: ‘I actually hated that we weren’t going to have laptops. But now I’m glad the professor actually did that. It was way more engaging not to have technology in the class.’

AI was messing with online submissions

Before the notebooks, I would normally have two or three primary-source assignments where students had to analyze a historical source and upload it as a Word document or PDF.

However, anxiety about whether my students were using AI to write their assignments was creating a trust problem in my classroom.

I didn’t want to approach my students with that sense of suspicion all the time. After all, maybe they hadn’t used AI.

So I thought: How can I bring back that trust between my students and I?

I was inspired by a colleague at NYU who was providing notebooks to his students in class.

After all, if they write by hand, then I’m not going to be as worried about whether they are using AI.

Even if a couple of students feed the questions to the AI and then write the generated answers by hand, that’s a win for me — they are still spending much more time thinking and writing.

They are more authentic

So far, the notebooks are going well — I’ve not received any negative comments. I can clearly see that the answers are more authentic — I see scribbles and crossed-out words, and attempts to replace them with better ones.

There are also more misspellings. I’ve had some cases where I’ve really had to scratch my head to decipher what they’ve written. But I would say 90% have been a joy to read so far.

The switch to the notebooks has added about 2 hours to my workweek, but it’s meant I’m having much more fun with my students. Two students asked if they could decorate the front page, and I’ve suggested we could even have an art contest at some point.

Many people have found the notebooks inspiring — one post I shared about them on X received over 11,000 likes.

Several colleagues have said they’re inspired to try implementing them as well. Others are worried about the class size and having to decipher different types of handwriting.

AI has democratized cheating

This is also not to say that I’m a Luddite.

Before AI, a much smaller group of students was cheating the system by paying people to write their exams. The accessibility and affordability of generative AI mean that this problem has simply become more widespread.

We have to accept that AI exists. You cannot ignore it — being good at the digital world is so important for my students’ future.

There are opportunities for AI to improve education, too. I’m a non-native English speaker myself — I know the trouble that I went through to fix my papers. Students without means can now have a virtual editor.

However, AI shouldn’t be there for you to put a prompt in and then ask it to write an essay on your behalf — that defeats the purpose of education.

As a historian who spends her days deciphering centuries-old handwriting, there’s nothing wrong with writing by hand. In fact, I think it’s something we should all practice.