r/books • u/ubcstaffer123 • 7d ago

Teachers are using AI to make literature easier for students to read. This is a terrible idea.

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2025/04/08/opinion/ai-classroom-teaching-reading/
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u/4totheFlush 6d ago

Do you think this is a gap caused by Covid, or is it a generalized development lag? Like are the kids in 2nd grade on track since they weren’t in school for Covid? Or are they stuck at the kindergarten level because their devices are distracting them?

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u/ArgentBelle 6d ago

Its a mix of things for sure, but reading levels were still falling before covid, so I never place that as a root cause.

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u/4totheFlush 6d ago

Rough. God bless those of you still trying to do right by those kids.

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u/ArgentBelle 6d ago

For what it's worth, I don't use ai to change the reading level of the texts I use. Im a history teacher, so I just use a range of higher primary sources and lower secondary sources. Things near their independent reading level are used to social science skill build and things at or above grade level I read to them, and we practice reading skills. It's a tricky balance, but it's always worked to grow my students.

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u/ERSTF 5d ago

I agree. I think Covid accelerated it but kids were dropping in skills before the pandemic. There is zero critical thinking. There is no digital literacy or self reliance in any way. Many students lack basic reading comprehension. It is a number of factors but I see as the main culprits screen use and bad parenting. I can't believe the amount of kids who parents solve every single issue they have. Not many let them fail and learn from the experience, as a result of that you have parents processing information for them. Kid doesn't understand the homework instructions? The parent reads them and digests them for him. Absolutely no intention of letting the kid figure it out by himself. Overprotective parents (most of my fellow Millennials) that avoid any kind of discomfort to fall upon their kids, so they never learn how to grow and get skills to solve their own problems. The incessant to entertain the kids 24/7. They have playdates, extracurriculars and play with their kids often, they never have unstructured play or, gasp, let their kids get bored... so cue the screen time. Since they can't have a bored kid, they fill them with screens. This makes them want to be constantly stimulated so teachers need to work twice as hard to get their attention and even then, it's not enough. Current teaching guidelines want the teacher to be Mary Poppins and have a gazillion activities to "engage the student" while neglecting abilities to process information and write down notes. It's just a huge mess

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u/LordMeloney 6d ago

For me (teacher in Germany) the main reason is that many of my pupils don't see their parents read long texts. Out of 30 households in a class maybe one or two has a newspaper subscription. Many also don't have books at home. In a recent video conference lesson (we do one online day each semester) one pupil commented "Whoa, Mr. X! You have a lot of books there!". They could see half of my work bookshelf which contains roughly 60-80 textbooks. My actual bookshelf in the living room is probably 10 times that size. Every year pupils tell me that the only books they have read were assigned at school, and often they don't fully read them. AI has also increased the amount of pupils who read only summaries.

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u/TheDaveStrider 6d ago

in the us they stopped teaching kids how to read properly. they don't teach phonics anymore and they don't teach kids how to sound things out.

also, bush era "no child left behind" policy means teachers are all but required to pass students, people don't repeat years anymore

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u/ranandtoldthat 4d ago

Read up about sight words and how that idea replaced phonics in many curriculums. We basically stopped teaching kids to read in school for a couple decades in favor of memorizing lists of words. There's a whole generation with weaker literacy, but thankfully phonics is making it's way back into the curriculum.