Why Can’t My Teen Finish Reading Assignments? What I Saw After Our School Blocked AI
The library still smelled like old carpet and lemon disinfectant when Javi raised his hand last Tuesday, 20 minutes into our 10th grade English independent work period. We were supposed to be working through a three-page New York Times piece on wild bee population decline for our upcoming argument essays, and Javi usually flies through work, one AirPod slung in his ear, half a soccer recruiting tab open in the background. When I leaned down, he nodded at his Chromebook screen, half embarrassed.
“Ms. Carter,” he said, quiet enough the kid next to him wouldn’t hear, “I can’t do this. My attention span is too short for whole articles.”
I glanced at his open tabs. There was Google Classroom, the soccer page, and a red blocked-url error screen where he’d tried to pull up a common AI chatbot 10 minutes earlier. Our district had flipped the switch on a full AI block across all school Wi-Fi and student devices the week before, over fall break, with barely a week’s warning to teachers.
Administrators had pushed for the block after a spike in fully AI-written lab reports and history essays last spring, plus a handful of angry parent emails saying schools were letting kids cheat their way through class. I got the frustration, but I’d seen the quieter trend long before the block. Back in September, I ran an anonymous check-in with my three sections of 10th grade, asking how they approached long reading assignments. Twenty-one out of my 28 honors students said they pasted every full article or textbook chapter into an AI tool before they read a single paragraph, just to get three bullet points of main takeaways.
They weren’t using it to write their essays, most of the time. They just used it to skip the reading itself. They’d show up to class, answer the basic comprehension questions, turn in their own original arguments, and no one would be the wiser. If I asked a specific, off-the-cuff question—like what the retired Iowa beekeeper said about his first bad crop year—half the room would go quiet. I wrote it off as skimming, the same thing kids did when I was in high school, pulling SparkNotes before a quiz. But this was different. This wasn’t skipping a 200-page novel to cram for a test. This was skipping three pages of nonfiction, just because they could.
Javi told me after class a few days later that it wasn’t that he was lazy. He has soccer practice three nights a week, a weekend shift at a local burger place, and four other core classes that assign homework every night. “If I tried to read every whole thing all the way through, I’d be up until 1 a.m.,” he said. “Everyone does it. It’s just working smarter.”
I didn’t argue with him then. I’ve felt that pull too, on weeknights when I’m tired and I see a 5,000-word magazine article I want to read, and my first instinct is to pull up a summary instead of wading through the opening anecdote. But standing next to him in the library that day, staring at that blocked error screen, the connection clicked.
The AI block didn’t give Javi, or any of my students, a short attention span. It just exposed how out of practice they already were at slow, linear reading.
Sustained reading isn’t a natural talent you’re born with. It’s a muscle you build, one paragraph at a time. Long articles don’t hand you the main point in the first three seconds, the way a short-form video or a pre-written AI summary does. They wander. They open with a small story, walk through conflicting evidence, ask you to hold a detail from page one in your head until it pays off on page three. For years now, my students have been able to opt out of that slow work entirely. The AI does the holding, the connecting, the waiting for the point. Their brains never had to build the stamina for it.
I’ve heard people argue AI is just a tool, no different from a calculator. I get that, and I don’t think AI is inherently bad for school work. But a calculator doesn’t replace learning your multiplication tables. If you hand a 10-year-old a calculator before they’ve built basic number sense, they’ll never learn to reason through a math problem on their own. That’s exactly what was happening here. We were so focused on whether AI helped kids cheat on final papers, no one noticed it was letting them skip the small, daily practice of working through a text on their own.
That day in the library, I didn’t give Javi a speech about paying attention. I walked over to the printer (which, for once, wasn’t jammed) and pulled him a hard copy of the bee article, grabbed a highlighter and a pen, and pulled up a chair.
“Let’s just do the first three paragraphs,” I said. “After each one, write three words in the margin that sum up what you just read. We don’t have to do the whole thing today.”
We worked through those three paragraphs in about five minutes. He didn’t reach for his phone once. Ten minutes later, he was halfway through page two. He told me later he’d gotten so used to getting the point immediately, his brain kept panicking a little when the opening didn’t spell out the whole argument right away.
I’ve made small shifts in my class in the six weeks since the block went live, nothing fancy. I print hard copies of almost all readings now, because even having a browser open with 10 unrelated tabs pulls half their focus away. I break 10-minute reading blocks into two five-minute chunks, with a 30-second turn-and-talk to the person next to them after each one, just to give their brain a break. I don’t ban AI entirely, even with the block — I tell kids if they get stuck on a confusing section after they’ve done a full first read, they can use it at home to walk through that part, just not to summarize the whole thing before they start.
When parents ask me what they can do at home, I don’t tell them to take away phones or ban AI entirely. That’s a fight most parents don’t have the energy for, and it doesn’t work anyway. I give them two small, specific changes. First, have kids do reading work at a kitchen or dining room table, with their phone on the counter across the room, not on vibrate in their pocket or open next to their laptop. Second, if they’re frustrated and say they can’t focus, don’t say “just try harder.” Say, “let’s do the first page together, then you can take a five minute walk.” One mom told me she started doing that with her 9th grade son, and ended up sitting and reading her own long-form news articles alongside him, because she realized her own attention span had gotten shorter too. Three nights a week, they do 15 minutes of quiet reading side by side before he starts the rest of his homework.
Not everything is fixed. I still have a handful of kids who can’t get through two paragraphs without reaching for a phone, even when it’s across the room. The district is still going back and forth on whether to unblock AI for supervised classroom use, and teachers are split on whether the block helps or just creates unnecessary frustration. Javi told me last week he still uses an AI summarizer sometimes, on nights when he has three readings due and soccer practice runs late. But he reads the first page first now, he said, and only uses the summary to fill in the gaps.
The block didn’t create this problem. It just pulled back the curtain on how much of the slow, messy work of reading we’ve all gotten comfortable skipping. We’re not rebuilding any kind of perfect focus overnight. Most days, it’s just one three-paragraph chunk, one scribbled margin note, at a time.
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