by Amy Ludwig VanDerwater, 2026 Conference Featured Author
Right now, as millions flirt with AI partners, discuss suicide with ChatGPT, doomscroll, laugh at fake videos of bunnies jumping on trampolines, soothe loneliness by talking with Alexa, and settle in for hours of gaming in both dingy basements and luxurious leather chairs, snow falls softly outside. One cardinal swoops across a cold winter sky. This small, feathered flash of red may go unnoticed though; many of us are looking at digital windows instead of out of glass ones. Our bodies are in the real world, but our minds are in the cloud.
As writing teachers, we show our charges how to analyze mentor texts, try craft moves, and study sentence structure. And while writing craft matters, it is important to remember that literature does not exist to be deconstructed. We humans write to share ideas, explore feelings, teach concepts, tell stories, and express opinions. Humans write to connect with other humans. Artists write and paint and dance and sing about their ideas. Yet often, our young writers lament, “I don’t have any ideas.”
In this very-virtual time in history, we must remind our students that the concrete world of our senses is a meaningful and worthwhile place to spend time and examine. It is our job as teachers of writing to help students find ideas by (re)connecting them to the actual, physical world of planet earth. How do we help our digital-native students believe they can conjure and elaborate on their own ideas without relying on Gemini?
Turn Tech Off When Not in Use – We can turn interactive whiteboards on when we use them and turn them off when we are finished using them. This models intention – we turn technology on when we need to use it. Screens need not constantly stare at us.
Read Books Straight Through – We can read whole poems and books straight through, allowing students to get lost in texts. By reading whole texts aloud, we give students new worlds to inhabit and imagine. Listening to whole texts focuses and lengthens attention and builds empathy. We can always return to these texts later to evaluate craft moves or character traits.
Visit Nature Outside – We can take children outside to make shadows, gather oak leaves, watch a robin look for worms, reminding these children that our world is beautiful, interesting, and worth learning about. We can teach them the names of a few local plants and animals so that they will recognize and care about these plants and animals as fellow living things.
Bring Nature Inside – We can set up a wee nature table, inviting students to share found shells and stones and pinecones, helping them notice and wonder about pocket-sized, free treasures. Many of the best treasures, after all, are free, and free is for everyone.
Keep Notebooks – We can write for a few minutes each day, by hand, in paper notebooks. By doing so, we help students develop agency as they realize one need not be plugged in to create. Writing in notebooks, students realize that thoughts come through the motion of a hand on the blankness of a page with the inkness of a pen.
Be Present – We can turn our own phones off when in our students’ presence. When we do this, we silently say, “I will not be distracted from this important time we have together.”
Make Art – We can make things with our hands, folding origami stars or painting with watercolors during a ten minute transition. Students deserve to know that their growing bodies can manipulate materials in the 3-D world as well as their thumbs can manipulate pixels in the 2-D world.
Make Peace with Quiet – We can provide a few moments of quiet, allowing students to put their heads down or close their eyes or breathe deeply. While they (and we) may be uncomfortable at first, they (and we) will come to trust that every quiet space need not be filled with beeping and Googling. Brains think new thoughts when given such space.
Engage Students’ Senses – We can offer our students tiny sensory experiences: smelling cinnamon, touching sheepskin, tasting cider. While video game characters fly and shoot aliens, human bodies touch and taste and smell and hear and see. We cannot control the hours of online time students spend at home, but we can feed their senses as we look at light through a prism or pass around a scrap of velvet. We can remind students that human beings have senses and that ideas come through these senses.
Listen and Model – When students say “I don’t know what to write,” we can listen. Rather than suggesting topics, we can share bits of our own real lives and pages from our own paper notebooks, modeling how we find ideas through the act of writing, modeling how we allow our thinking to change and do not expect perfect ideas to arrive fully formed. We can trust that – through our trust – young writers can and will welcome ideas of their own.
Yes, AI is everywhere. Yes, many parents know students’ grades before students do, and many young people are digitally tracked wherever they go. Yes, children and adults both play hours of video games daily. Yes, it is difficult to know what is real and what is not real online. It’s all true. But so are cardinals true. So is snow true. And a most precious role of the writing teacher is to point to cardinals, to encourage students to touch snow. For real.
For ideas’ sake.
Amy Ludwig VanDerwater is author of several poetry and picture books for children, including Forest Has a Song, With My Hands: Poems About Making Things,Write! Write! Write!, and her latest, The Sound of Kindness. A former elementary school teacher and longtime writing teacher with a master’s degree from Teachers College, Columbia University, Amy is also author of the professional book Poems Are Teachers: How Studying Poetry Strengthens Writing in All Genres. She has blogged for children at The Poem Farm since 2010 and is interested in your ideas about keeping it real in education. Find Amy online HERE, and watch for her forthcoming book, John and Betsy, a story told through poems.
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