Tutoring is an Anti-Tech Process (Part 4 of 4)

National test scores are declining, while money spent on Education Technology is increasing. Is this the reason why demand for tutoring is also increasing? What does tutoring offer that the classroom may not?

I have written about the important partnership that one-on-one learning creates, but it bears repeating that I believe tutoring is as much EQ as it is IQ. Accordingly, the human engagement that comes from working with a prepared and responsive tutor is so much more impactful than time spent on “educational” devices and platforms. In fact, tutors often work to counter the glitchy and bureaucratic demands that are increasingly embedded in K-12 education, helping connect students to challenging material—and to themselves.

In much of education today, students are learning to work technology, while technology does the work of learning. I believe technology in education robs students of certain key learning experiences:

1. Managing one’s time and materials

2. Working at one’s own pace

3. Personalizing one’s academic journey

4. Being usefully confused; identifying what one knows and what one doesn’t

5. Independently coming up with solutions

In previous posts, I’ve written how homework portals such as Blackbaud and Google Classroom are helpful for administrators, but in fact create bureaucracies that place students in a passive position. Students rely on these online databases to receive and submit assignments, but these portals are often overly complex and unintuitive, and they foster procrastination. They become online spaces that allow students to evade responsibility for managing their own time and materials. It would be much better for a student to have a paper planner and to be taught how to write down and plan for upcoming assignments, marking out anticipated timelines and key steps to the final result (handing in an essay, taking a test, etc.). Also, tech platforms can be glitchy, and when they go on the fritz or when Wi-Fi fails, academic progress ceases. Even worse, hackers have begun targeting these systems to steal student data or demand ransom. The portal for my own children’s school, PowerSchool, was hacked in December, 2024, affecting millions of students and their teachers.¹

I’ve also written how word-processing “autocorrect” features mean that students never master proper spelling and rules of grammar. Calculators now perform highly complex functions: push the right buttons, and you’ve solved the quadratic equation, even if you have no idea what you did. Though “autocorrect” and a TI-84 calculator are ways to get a right answer, they do it before the student can work through the problem at his own pace—a crucial principle and not so easy for students to figure out about themselves on their own. Working methodically and not rushing to answers reinforces a sense of process, which should include double-checking in math and editing when writing.

I’m only in my 40s, but I’m shocked to learn that many students don’t know how to “use” a book. Even college professors no longer expect students to complete assigned reading.² A logical consequence is a decline in the ability to take notes. Reading actively and writing notes in book margins is the best way to engage with information, and neuroscientists have found that physical note-taking and then reorganizing notes after a class discussion are essential to storing information in long-term memory.³ It’s also the best way to personalize one’s responses to the reading, no matter the subject, by underlining and writing ideas in the margins. Now that textbook PDFs and e-books have become the norm, students no longer hold a physical copy in their hands. Some platforms allow notes to be scribbled onto screens, but the features are awkward, and in my experience students don’t usually slow down to take notes when screen-reading.

Brain imaging has demonstrated conclusively that old-fashioned writing by hand—slow, inefficient, and painstaking compared to typing on a computer—activates areas in the brain that keyboard typing does not.⁴ Handwriting engages the brain at a deeper level because it forces it to synchronize motor and visual systems. It makes the brain work, which makes the brain learn. As Natalie Wexler has written in her

Minding the Gap

newsletter, studies have found that weaving writing into regular instruction promotes learning.⁵

Because tech platforms privilege speed and deliver correct answers at the click of a button, students are denied the right to be confused—a fertile and necessary precondition to learning. Confusion signals that the brain is holding two ideas and cannot find a way to connect or integrate them. The student must then push and pull at seemingly irreconcilable ideas until he finds a way to make them fit. But EdTech deprives students of uncertainty because it makes what should be a slow, ruminative, personal, student-driven process into something “clickable.” When computers eliminate confusion, students cannot dwell in the uncertain state that generates possibilities. Confusion builds important skills, such as creativity and persistence. We should keep in mind that confusion is the natural state of the curious and engaged learner.

Technology also oversteps by offering solutions the student hasn’t come up with herself. Internet research can lead to questionable or shallowly skimmed sources, offering students a quote for a paper without their having to read the whole work thoroughly. Students may find a footnote-able primary source, but it does not add to their knowledge of the question they’re researching. ChatGPT may spit out an entire essay from a few keywords, and Google Gemini can surely offer quite a few facts culled from web pages everywhere, but these are not the independent solutions that students need. (And some search results and AI summaries are, in fact, factually incorrect, if they are using bad data themselves.)

Tutoring aims to combat all these pernicious influences, to slow learning down and to create repeatable steps. Removing students from EdTech is a way of reconnecting them with themselves and to their own active minds. That doesn’t happen at the click of a button, but with time and practice, it will.

1. “PowerSchool data breach,” Tech Target, accessed January 15, 2025, https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/feature/PowerSchool-data-breach-Explaining-how-it-happened.

2. “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books,” The Atlantic, accessed November 30, 2024, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/11/the-elite-college-students-who-cant-read-books/679945/.

3. Daniel T. Willingham, Outsmart Your Brain: Why Learning is Hard and How You Can Make It Easy, 2023, 75.

4. “Why writing by hand beats typing for thinking and learning,” National Public Radio, accessed June 20, 2024, https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2024/05/11/1250529661/handwriting-cursive-typing-schools-learning-brain.

5. “To Boost Learning, Weave Writing Activities into Regular Instruction,” Mind The Gap, Substack, accessed July 25, 2024, https://nataliewexler.substack.com/p/to-boost-learning-weave-writing-activities.