1985-2025: Changes over my First 40 Years

In case you’re a first-time reader, this is my 40th year as an educator. This school year, I have been writing about the changes that I have experienced throughout my career. 

Artificial Intelligence certainly qualifies as a change since 1985.  

Hosting FWCD’s newest grandparents for our annual luncheon (allowing the grands to watch the Lower School Halloween Parade after lunch), I emceed a panel of students in grades 4-12 last week. I asked the students about their use of technology. The grandparents in the audience were about my age. They (and I)  were in school as Texas Instruments was rolling out their initial, pretty impressive calculators. The Datamath’s functions seemed like magic to me. Before that, I really was using an abacus and slide rule (not to actually get answers, but to learn how they worked). The same was true for most of the gathered grandparents. 

To expand on my generation’s version of “technology,” I was especially excited that my college in New Hampshire (Dartmouth) and a friend’s college in Pennsylvania (Ursinus) were on the same wired computer network, which allowed us to access computers in our respective libraries and “pass notes.” The catch was that we had to make a long-distance call (remember when each of those showed up on a bill?), just to arrange the chance to pass those electronic notes. Given that we often arranged for those live exchanges to occur on Friday nights, you can guess how socially active my friend and I were during our freshman years; regardless, we certainly thought the technology was amazing. 

By the fall of my senior year (1984), Dartmouth required us all to get Apple Macintosh computers. Four of us had an apartment together, and the discoveries of Mac tricks occurred in our living room constantly. We had the perfect petri dish arrangement for learning about the desktop creations that were possible with Apple. Again, we thought that technology was amazing.

In my first year as a teacher in Houston (1996), the school I was working at (St. John’s) adopted school email addresses. Laptops continued to evolve until iPhones rocked our world in 2007. For me, it was one of the eighth graders I was chaperoning on a two-week exchange to Guadalajara who introduced me to the phenomenon of those pocket-sized computers.  

The 2010s have been entirely different. At FWCD, iPads have become integral to the Lower School and Middle School curricula over the last decade, serving as versatile tools for internet access, Google Docs collaboration, Apple Classroom management, and multimedia creation through photographs and videos. We move from iPads to laptops in the Upper School. Whereas we had a room devoted to desktop machines in the Moncrief Library in the 1990s and early 2000s, students have been carrying around their personal computers at FWCD since 2014. 

For the Halloween grandparent audience, I asked the Upper School students, in particular, to talk about their use of AI. I shared my favorite use of AI at this stage in our learning: AI as a machine to create test reviews is a game-changer. In my day, we “looked over” our notes and our underlining in textbooks or novels, and maybe we reviewed old math tests and homework as preparation for tests. We know from much research that learning is so much deeper, and so much more information is retained if the test preparation process involves actually being quizzed on the material in advance of the test. So, what if you give AI all of your notes, your readings, your teacher’s review topics and ask that AI to create practice tests for you (including the answers that you can access when you’re done taking the practice test)? That is 2025’s version of amazing technology.

AI poses some definite risks. As usual, those risks are about inappropriate tasks that kids (or adults) may ask AI to do for them. We will not be able to legislate away all inappropriateness, but we also do not need to outlaw AI out of fear. We need to harness the use of AI for valid purposes, like reviewing for a test. More to come on this topic as our early adopter students and faculty at FWCD continue to make discoveries and design best-use situations for AI at our school. I feel so fortunate to have been in schools for these 40 years, as so many fantastic creations, so much amazing technology, have/has come online.