The AI Paradox: Why Tech Sped Up the World but Slowed Down Your Classroom

Image for If Teachers Ruled the World Season 2 Episode 4 about AI and Student attention spans, "The AI Paradox: Why Tech Sped Up the World but Slowed Down Your Classroom."

Lessons are taking longer this year, and it’s not just you. There’s a connection between AI and student attention spans. We’re using 2024 research on how this generation of students learns differently to makes the case for why scaffolding versus rigor is a false choice. The real answer is teaching up while providing the support kids need to get there, even when that support takes more time and energy than we’d like.

There’s a conversation happening in teacher lounges right now. It’s not a new one, but it’s gotten loud again. The last time it hit this decibel was 2016, when we were seeing the impact of smartphones and social media on Gen Zers. This time it’s AI, and it’s moving faster than that first wave did.

There’s a paradox at the center of it: technology has sped up everything about the world our students live in, and somehow it’s slowing down everything happening in our classrooms. In this episode, I sit down with that contradiction and try to figure out what’s happening, using a bellringer example from my 7th grade ELA class.

AI and Student Attention Spans

Okay, I can’t directly tie diminishing attention spans to AI, but it’s tempting. When you can type a prompt into a chat bot and have your assignment done for you, why should you pay attention?

Case in point:

I started building a writing program called Writing Blocks years ago for ninth and tenth graders. I figured I could bring a piece of it into my seventh grade classroom this year without too much friction. Not the full program–just bits of it to reinforce their writing practice.

I was wrong, but not in the way I expected. I thought the writing part would be the hardest for them. It wasn’t. It was remembering the process from week-to-week. A new week, same process, but I’m having to spend time completely reteaching it.

The Moment I Realized It Wasn’t Just Me

Lessons will occasionally take longer than you think, especially when you’re new to a grade level and subject. That’s normal. But when it’s also happening to colleagues who’ve taught the same subject and grade level for years, that’s a pattern I want to explore. My early career fears about underplanning have disappeared from my radar–almost everything has become too much.

I don’t want to throw around generational theories without evidence (Gen X slacker, here), so I looked for research instead of relying on a hunch. There’s been a little. I found a 2024 study surveying close to 140 middle school teachers, and it surfaced the same issues I’ve been noticing. Students are struggling more with basic concepts. The researchers found teachers split on what to do about it. You’ll hear both sides, and why I don’t think either one is wrong.

There’s a camp that says raise the rigor, and a camp that says these kids need everything simplified. Those aren’t really opposing philosophies when you think about it. I’ll explain why I’ve landed somewhere in the middle, and what that looks like.

The Part We Don’t Usually Say Out Loud

Being the scaffold for a room full of kids who need this much support is exhausting, and I don’t think teachers say that enough without guilt attached. I get honest about the actual cost of this kind of teaching, and why naming it doesn’t mean you’re doing anything wrong.

Key Takeaway: Scaffolding isn’t the opposite of rigor, it’s the path to it. If your lessons are taking longer than they used to, it might mean you’re doing the harder, slower work of building toward real independence, not that you’re falling behind.

Key Moments:

00:00:00 – Leah introduces this month’s topic: the AI paradox behind why lessons are taking longer, and how it echoes the 2016 smartphone-era shift in classrooms.

00:01:50 – Leah lays out the pattern she and her PLC partner are both seeing, regardless of experience level, when it comes to how long lessons actually take to execute.

00:03:01 – The framed sentence bell ringer story begins, including the moment Leah realizes a whole-group announcement isn’t reaching half her students.

00:04:07 – The following Tuesday reset: why a lesson that had already gone well twice had to start completely over, and what that reveals about attention span and retention this year.

00:05:42 – Leah shares findings from a 2024 study on middle school teachers’ experiences with this generation of students, and the surprising disagreement it uncovered among educators.

00:06:51 – Leah connects the research to her own PLC’s decision to teach up rather than scale back, drawing on Fisher, Frey, and Shanahan’s scaffolding research.

00:08:39 – Leah names the real cost of being the scaffold for students who need this much support, and offers her takeaway for any teacher feeling that same weight this year.

Resources and Links

The Differentiation Myth: Why Scaffolding Up Beats Leveling Down – If Teachers Ruled the World, August 25, 2026, Season 2, Episode 2 on Fisher, Frey, and Shanahan’s scaffolding research, referenced throughout this episode

Huss, J., & Eastep, S. (2024). Study on middle school teachers’ perceptions of Generation Alpha students, surveying nearly 140 teachers across Indiana, Kentucky, and Ohio, published in i.e.: inquiry in education

What’s Behind the Decade-Long ‘Learning Recession’ for American Students – PBS NewsHour, for more on the achievement side of this trend: a decade of declining scores tied to the rise of smartphones and social media around 2013

Prefer Reading? I’ve Got You…

Podcast Transcript – If Teachers Ruled the World
Show Transcript
00:00:00 – Leah Cleary Welcome back to If Teachers Ruled the World. Since we’re about a month into the school year now, at least a lot of us are, I thought it would be a good time to talk about something I always hear teachers buzzing about, but it has intensified lately.
The last time I noticed the buzz getting this loud about this topic, it was around 2016, and that makes sense. At that point, 2016, we were seeing the culminating effect of smart devices and social media. We’re seeing another shift now, and this one’s changing things even faster.
See, the kids we’re teaching now never lived in a world without smartphones. They never lived in a world without social media. And now, well, now we’ve thrown AI into the mix. AI is changing how long everything takes to teach, and not for the better. I want to pull on that thread today: the paradox that tech’s sped the world up, but it’s slowing our classrooms down.
00:01:50 – Leah Cleary Here’s what I keep noticing. Everything we do in class is taking a lot longer than I planned. A lot, lot longer. And I don’t just mean for me. I’m new to seventh grade ELA this year, so that would check if it were just me. But my PLC partner, not new to seventh grade ELA, she’s seeing the same thing. Whatever we plan, it takes longer than we think it will to execute.
Here’s an example. I have a writing program I use called Writing Blocks. I built it for ninth and tenth graders. I scaffold it with framed sentences. You give students a mentor sentence, take some of the words out, and leave blanks for them to fill in. It helps kids notice sentence structure by playing with it. It’s deliberate practice for kids who aren’t big readers, so most of our students.
I thought, I can translate this to seventh grade. We’ll do it once or twice as a bell ringer each week. They’re going to pick it up pretty quickly. It’s not difficult.
00:03:01 – Leah Cleary So the first day we did it, I tell the class, everybody get your bell ringer sheet out. Copy down the sentence frame. Don’t worry about anything else yet. And I have to walk around and check, because if I just make the announcement to the whole room, at least half of them won’t do it.
I don’t think they’re being defiant. It’s like you’re speaking a different language when you’re addressing the whole group instead of just them individually. I ended up going person to person and saying, write this down. Start with, “There is nothing more blank.” Yes, write a blank, then blank, and write that second blank too.
Then I showed them three examples I came up with. I talked them through what I wanted them to do next. That first day, it did go pretty well, all things considered. They copied the frame. They saw my examples. They came up with their own. I felt good. That was a Tuesday.
00:04:07 – Leah Cleary We did the same thing on Thursday, and they did well with some small reminders. But then we came back to it the following Tuesday, and, guys, we had to start completely over. I mean, way back from the beginning. Get the frame down. Here we go again. Write the blank, like the other two days had never happened. They just weren’t in their memory.
Something that should have taken ten minutes turned into twenty. Having to reteach something we’ve done before because it’s a new week, and that’s not a one time thing. That’s a pattern a lot of us are noticing.
I want to point this out because when I first started teaching middle school many, many years ago, I was afraid of finishing a lesson too early and having extra time with nothing to do. Idle hands and all. Extra time is the least of my worries now. The thing that stresses me out now is never having enough time.
This isn’t just a middle school thing. I was seeing the same changes in high school too, over the last few years, especially with my ninth and tenth graders.
So of course, I went looking into whether there’s any research on this, because I try to avoid unchecked generational theories. That probably has something to do with my Gen X status. We were all slackers, if you remember that, sans any evidence of it.
00:05:42 – Leah Cleary I found a study from 2024 by two researchers at Northern Kentucky University, John Huss and Shannon Eastep. They surveyed close to 140 middle school teachers across Indiana, Kentucky, and Ohio about what they’re seeing with this generation of students.
A lot of what they found checks with what I just described. Teachers reported having to break assignments down into tiny little pieces, with embedded feedback at every single step, just to get any sort of traction with the kids.
But here’s the nuance, and we love nuance on this podcast. That same study found disagreement among teachers about what to do with that information. Some teachers leaned into shorter, more concise tasks, while others pushed back and said no, kids need to learn to sit with not knowing the answer right away. It’s a necessary skill.
And neither camp is wrong. It is an open question, and a lot of it depends on context.
00:06:51 – Leah Cleary But the nuance is where I fall, because in my PLC we made a very deliberate choice to teach up. This connects to that episode we did a couple of weeks ago, “The Differentiation Myth: Why Scaffolding Up Beats Leveling Down,” where I talked about the research from Fisher, Frey, and Shanahan on the teacher as the scaffold.
We’re not making the assignment easier for the kids. We’re giving them higher level study questions, more free response over multiple choice. We’re teaching them to take notes on their own instead of handing them notes. Our expectations continue to be high.
But to get the students there, we’re having to scaffold like crazy. We’re breaking things into itty bitty parts. We’re modeling constantly. We’re walking them through step by step in class because we want them doing the hardest thinking while we’re there to support it. That’s productive struggle. That is not something I would send home with students for them to fight through alone.
So if there’s a bridge between the camp that says raise the rigor and the camp that says kids need everything broken down, I think this is it. The scaffolding is not instead of rigor. The scaffolding is how you get to rigor.
Nobody climbs Mount Everest as their first hike. You train on small mountains first. Sometimes that training takes a lot longer than you think it will. Especially now, when a lot of them get AI to do the climbing for them.
00:08:39 – Leah Cleary And I want to be clear here, because I don’t want to gloss over it. Being the scaffold is hard work. It takes an enormous amount of energy to break things down this many times, to model this much, to walk around checking on every single kid and giving every single kid feedback.
There’s pushback from students, too, because this kind of learning asks a lot of them. I’m not saying that to complain, and I’m definitely not disparaging these kids. I think how they’re learning makes sense when you look at the world around them. I’m saying it because if you’re feeling that particular weight this year, you need to know it’s not just you, and it doesn’t mean you’re doing something wrong.
So here’s my takeaway. If you’re in that place right now where your plans are taking way longer than they used to, it might not mean you’re behind. It might mean you’re doing the slower, harder work of building toward independent learning.
The goal’s never the scaffold, the goal’s what happens after you take the scaffold away. Just know that might take longer to get to than it used to, and that’s okay.
Thanks for listening, and I’ll see you next time on If Teachers Ruled the World.

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