Kylee Pastore Asirvatham
I love writing. I teach writing. And still, I confess, I often avoid writing. The blinking cursor taunts me. Writing front-loads effort with no guaranteed payoff—an uncomfortable fact that clashes with our culture’s taste for efficiency. Yet this risk is more intrinsic to all of our endeavors than we often care to admit. We like to think we live in a world that we can control: if we work hard, we get the promotion; if we invest our money, we'll get a return; if we make an exciting discovery, we'll be praised; if we abide by the law, we'll stay out of detainment or jail; if we go to enough counseling, we'll overcome our problems; if we answer a question, we'll be heard. No matter how well this motivates us, outcomes frequently lie outside our control. Writing, though, that's an activity that won't let you fall prey to the certainty formula. When I sit down to write, I regularly think, What's the use of this? I can't guarantee that it will be published or that people will read it. I can't even guarantee that it will be decent when I finish or that I will finish at all. And as soon as I succumb to the modern cult of utility-determines-value and the pressures of using my time wisely, that’s when I'm most desperate to find a way to expedite the writing process.
I think my students feel something similar; it's why they turn to AI habitually to write papers for my literature and writing classes. Some are Biology majors, and Homer's Odyssey just doesn't have a visible impact on their career trajectory. Some work full-time, care for their family members, and often take four or five courses a semester. Meditating on the rhythm of a sentence consumes valuable time that could be used for a much-needed break. And what can I tell them? Those things are true. In fact, I often wrestle with my own version of them, too.
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Large language models have disrupted our writing pedagogy, much like the Spinning Jenny did in the early days of the Industrial Revolution, introducing automation into the analog machine for streamlined output. Brian Merchant points out in his book Blood in the Machine that we, in the North Atlantic, live in a society where disturbing and disrupting an industry is prized. And this disruption is often the catalyst for both excitement and pain. Those of us who love writing and have made our careers in it not only find our love challenged by large language models, but also find the trajectory of our careers potentially splintered or at least devalued. Yet, disruption doesn’t need to be the enemy or even an obstacle. In fact, we often rely on it.
In education, disruption has long been curiosity’s Miracle-Grow: shaking loose routines, unsettling assumptions, and opening up space for new ways of thinking. If Heidegger is right that technology is a mode of revealing, then generative AI is the means by which writing shows up to us differently and asks, "What am I?" and "What worth do I have?" anew. Generative AI has prompted writers and educators not only to reimagine writing but also to reconsider what we're doing in a classroom altogether.
For a time, I proudly thought of myself as a Luddite. It freed me to be antagonistic toward anything labeled "new." I felt liberated—as though I could step back from the zeitgeist of the AI revolution and watch from the margins. But teaching didn't allow me to linger in that posture. It demanded that I confront the disruption directly, a kind of reality calling out to be discovered. At first, I responded with resistance. I scrutinized student papers for signs of AI usage. I focused more on detection than on the writing itself or the student's ideas. This retaliatory stance became blinding—it rendered ineffective my ability to teach with clarity and empathy.
Next, I swung in a different direction: I ignored AI entirely. I left it out of my syllabus, never mentioned it in lectures, and continued grading as if we were still in a pre-ChatGPT world. But this strategy also failed. It removed me from the world my students were actually living in. I wasn't meeting them where they were. In retrospect, it was a pedagogy centered on my own comfort and resistance rather than on their needs or growth.
Eventually, I shifted again—this time, shockingly even to me, toward full embrace. I let AI assist me with writing emails, organizing student feedback, grading papers, generating lesson ideas, and crafting assignment prompts. It was incredibly helpful, and I leaned into that help. But in hindsight, I realize that I had been carried away by its power in ways that made me uncomfortable, less engaged, and honestly a worse teacher. Whether driven by fear and preservation or by the thrill of harnessing a new technology, I found that both approaches were inadequate.
In February 2025, I joined a professional development workshop at CCNY on AI in writing with several adjunct faculty in the English department. We discussed, studied, and experimented with AI in the writing discipline, all while carefully attuned to our intellectual and emotional postures along the way. Some of us had been using AI for menial and administrative tasks for a while already. Some also used it to help craft assignment directions and prompts, and had it give tips on how to arrange lectures. Others were resistant to AI, urging students not to use it for assignments and occasionally ignoring it when they did. We discussed our experiences, including positive, negative, and seemingly neutral observations of interacting with AI in our pedagogy, personal uses, and student interactions. What ended up happening, though, wasn't only reflecting on the past: longingly meditating on what teaching writing used to look like. Nor did we speculate much on what the future of writing education could hold. Instead, we improvised, or at least tried. Really, to carry on as English educators, we could take a few tips from improv comedy: the presence, the attunement to one another, trust, and teamwork. Speculate all you want about the future of writing technologies, but what we have to respond to is the here and now, and that here and now is rapidly changing. No more "next semester I will..." By the time we find ourselves in the next semester, the technology, its uses, or studies surrounding it will have already changed. But before we can improvise in the now, we need to establish the scene. We need to have a firm grasp on the why and what we are doing in the writing classroom.
Learning to write is not just about acquiring knowledge or skills. It's about learning to confront the limits of what we know and having the courage to continue forward into the unknown in order to understand it. It's about developing a deep understanding of a particular subject or field. It is a chance to turn away from the cultural liturgies of speed, capital value, and immediate utility, the societal pressures to do things quickly, for profit, and for immediate gain, and trust that learning how to write is doing more for us than we can track on Google Analytics. It's about developing a deeper understanding of the world and our place in it. It’s about forming connections, empathy, and confidence.
In The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt argues that the sudden and massive shift in how teens use technology, especially the rise of smartphones and social media, provides the most plausible explanation for the steep decline in youth mental health. One of his core ideas is that these technologies disrupt genuine, embodied connections—face-to-face, synchronous interactions like spending time with friends or playing outside—by replacing them with disembodied, screen-based ones. Writing is a practice that speaks directly to this. It situates us in the world. Learning skills of observation and listening, and learning to document those in evocative vocabulary and clear syntax, slows down thought and connects them with that very thing or person we are trying to describe. In the world of ideas writing facilitates meditation.
Like David Foster Wallace's fish, writing makes us ask, "What the hell is water?" in a culture where opinions are demanded of us and polarization is the crutch we lean on to quickly assemble those opinions. We absorb ideas like oxygen, hardly aware of what's coming into our minds and hearts and what's going out. Writing stops us in our tracks, asking: "Do you really believe this?" "Is this reasonable?" "Is this the best option?" If we never stop to engage in this process, we often end up downloading the update of whatever our social bubbles are passing around without reading about what that update entails. Perhaps writing is one of those synchronous activities that Haidt referred to. One that fosters a connection to others, to the world, to ideas, and to ourselves.
In my World Humanities class, I've often referred to AI as the lotus fruit from the Odyssey. It offers immediate gratification—but with a cost. The lotus fruit isn't just a metaphor for distraction; it's a symbol of forgetfulness, of severance from one's inner world. Writing, by contrast, grounds us in the slow work of becoming. What I've noticed is that if you ask AI before thinking on your own, it can redirect your thoughts before you've even had the chance to form them. This effect is often imperceptible in the moment. Curiosity, however, asks us to dwell a little longer in uncertainty, to think for ourselves before we reach for convenience. Successful learning is to confront the limits of what you know and dare to continue forward into that unknown in order to break through to a new understanding, rather than merely a superficial opinion about the subject. Successful learning creates something.
I want students to know the joy of making something from nothing. This joy is not just satisfaction, but a signal of contact with something meaningful, evidence that writing can root us in something real, even amidst fragmentation. I also want them to experience the feeling of accomplishment after completing a piece, but even more I hope they feel the sense of connection that writing brings. In a world where connection is dwindling and loneliness is on the rise, writing becomes a vital link: to the self, to the world, to events, to ideas, and to people. Whether it's a reader on the other end or the cultivation of empathy, understanding, and curiosity, writing reminds us we are not alone.
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Before we teach students to use AI ethically and effectively, we must first understand its strengths and limits—and writing's strengths and limits, too. This means reconsidering not only how we teach, but why. In The Technological Society, Jacques Ellul discusses the erosion of technique over time. He distinguishes technology from technique—the know-how that makes a tool useful. Over time, tools can eclipse technique. In writing, that loss matters. Current research suggests that strong writers are more effective users of AI. Even if students continue to rely on AI in the future, regardless of their philosophy or profession they will still need firsthand experience with writing techniques to use AI meaningfully and effectively. The erosion of foundational writing technique will directly impact our students' ability to communicate effectively, whether they pursue a writing-based career or not.
There is a general belief that our students are not as strong writers as they were in the past, but it's essential to understand that strong writers are not necessarily those who know the rules and follow them. Steven Pinker, in The Sense of Style, argues that literacy is not in decline but in evolution—and this evolution of language is not new at all. Every generation of young people often coins vivid, lively turns of phrase. Their creativity reveals something vital: the way we use language shapes how we live, and how we relate to others and to the physical world around us. An overreliance on AI in the fundamental pen-to-page, blinking-cursor moment of writing actually squashes our students' innate, inventive perspective on what words can do. Yes, there are writing rules, but knowing and using those rules are not the absolute tell-all of a strong communicator.
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After that professional development workshop, I had to ask, but what can I actually do? Smack in the middle of the AI gold rush the real question is: how am I reinventing my pedagogy now and into this semester? There are a few things. I don't intend to abandon writing completely as a form of assessment, but I am adapting it. Rather than using writing to assess static knowledge, I'm focusing on thought development: how ideas grow, shift, and take shape over time. One significant change I've made to facilitate this is switching to one-on-one oral examinations as a primary method of evaluating knowledge retention. So instead of using papers to test what students know, I'm more interested in how they're becoming thinkers—how writing can shape who they are and how they relate to ideas, people, and the world.
I've begun giving in-person or recorded audio/video feedback on student writing, which has been particularly effective with the student writers I supervise and my current Prose Writing students. This format allows me to explain more fully why certain changes are needed in their papers, stories, or articles, and how those changes serve their thinking and communication. It also allows me to answer their questions in real time. So far, this approach has proven much more effective than written comments or marginal notes, especially in helping students understand revision as a dialogic process.
Rather than decree rules or outsource judgment to software, I urge students to consider the basics: What kind of thinkers and writers do they want to become, and when does AI help or hinder that at this stage of their writing? I want them to ask not only what they want to learn, but why it matters, and what it means to write in a world increasingly shaped by machines. By inviting slow thought and welcoming friction, we resist the cultural pressure to make learning efficient and transactional. We make room for formation, for wonder, for a different kind of time.
The task is not to forbid AI or fling the gates wide; it’s to reframe what we’re doing when we teach writing. As AI evolves, pedagogy should improvise quickly, locally, communally, and with purpose, but only after we name our goal: to grow thinkers, not merely producers. In my classes, the order is simple—thought first, tool second—not to ban or bless AI, but to keep technique alive.
The process of writing connects us to the natural world and to one another; it steadies judgment and builds confidence. Yes, ultimately, writing is an inefficient process. That’s the point. So in the end, I suppose the blinking cursor is the best teacher in the room after all.
Kylee Pastore Asirvatham is the Communications and Events Specialist for the Division of Humanities and the Arts at The City College of New York, where she also teaches writing as an Adjunct Assistant Professor of English. Her work bridges pedagogy, storytelling, and public-facing humanities, with a focus on making intellectual life accessible beyond the classroom. She is the author of the novel Good Blood and has published essays on literature, film, faith, and attention in contemporary culture. Her writing and teaching are driven by a belief in slowness, care, and meaning-making in an increasingly accelerated world.