[00:00:05] Priten: Welcome to Margin of Thought, where we make space for the questions that matter. I'm your host, Priten, and together we'll explore questions that help us preserve what matters while navigating what's coming. My guest today is Nate odi. Nate and I have been friends since we met almost a decade ago when we worked on a common project. He now teaches ninth grade humanities statistics and calculus at a small religious K to 12 independent school. The school has deliberately chosen a low tech approach. What's striking is that the students and parents seem to want this. We'll explore what happens when a school community decides that relationality matters more than connectivity. Why friction in human relationships might be essential rather than something to eliminate. And what it means to teach in a context where the default isn't optimization, but formation. Nate and I are always asking some of the same big questions, so let's see what Nate is thinking about today.
[00:01:05] Nate: I am very fortunate to give you my context from my school. We are kind of retro in that we have Chromebooks, but we don't use them that often. Most of our instruction happens the old fashioned way. When I teach 9th grade humanities, we occasionally watch videos in class, but I don't think last year I had them use laptops at all. I might have done a couple activities on Desmos in stats. I don't think I had my Calc students using devices ever. I would sometimes use Desmos to illustrate concepts, and I would send them links to Khan Academy or that kind of thing. But not much device use happening in the school. We've banned phones for up to 10th grade, and actually we're talking about whether we'll ban them for the 11th and 12th graders as well. So we have been very earnest about the device concerns that you're describing, following a lot of Jonathan Haidt, and the kind of—
[00:02:07] Priten: Yeah.
Nate: He laid it out really clearly and persuasively in a couple of different books. We've had training of the parents. We've had people come in and talk to the parents about this, and the parents are very onboard. So theoretically we're gonna double down on it next year. This year was our first time experimenting with having the 9th and 10th graders turn in their phones at the beginning of the school day. Of course, a lot of them weren't really doing it and we weren't really policing it, but by and large, I think this must be a total anomaly. When I'm teaching, I'm hardly ever confiscating a phone and I'm not catching the quick glance at the phone kind of.
Priten: Yeah.
Nate: I think some of the kids really do just keep it in their locker. You just don't see it. And then even in the lunchroom and the gym, I mean, I could be on lunch duty and walk in and sometimes there's a few usual suspects who've got their phone out and I confiscate.
[00:03:07] But first of all, when I confiscate it, they totally know. I don't have grief from them. They just hand it to me, because they know it's against the rules. And they're not gonna argue with me about it. Second of all, the students seem to appreciate what Jonathan Haidt has talked about—the students actually know it's bad for them and they sort of want you to take it. So if you ask them, "Should we get rid of your phones?" a bunch of them will say yes. Of course some of them won't. Anyway, I'd be sitting in the lunchroom on lunch duty and thinking, wow, this is pretty cool. Most of these kids are just talking to each other. That's all that's happening. They're not on their basis. They're just talking like normal humans. It's amazing. Or being in the gym during middle school lunch, if I'm covering middle school lunch, they let the kids, after 15 minutes, play basketball in the gym and it's like mayhem.
[00:04:01] But it's exactly what 6th, 7th, and 8th graders should be doing. Running around like banshees in the gym, throwing sport balls at each other, but they're not on their phones. It's great. Some of them don't have phones. I think that must be pretty rare based on what you just said and my general sense of things. We have an IT director, and obviously they wanna make sure that we have good projector equipment and good stuff in the school, but we're not obsessed with one-to-one. We're definitely not opposed to using tech for teaching and assessment, it's just that we expect the classroom is not based around that in any substantial way. I found a few use cases where it was helpful to have kids on their devices, but for the reasons you're describing, I've steered away from it because I know they're on their phones for six hours a day when they're not in the school building. We have pretty regular conversations with our students about it. I have conversations with my advisees. I'm an advisor, which means I have eight or ten 10th graders that I talk to once a week.
[00:05:01] Half the time my conversation with them is "How are you doing getting to sleep?" and the number one factor for getting to sleep is "Did you put your phone away at 9 PM?" But a lot of them have healthy routines where their parents don't let their phone live in their bedroom. They turn it in at 9 PM or that kind of thing. So people seem pretty clued in to the concerns about phone addiction.
Priten: I quickly want to learn a little bit more about the context of the students before they enter high school. Are most of your students also doing middle school within your building? Is it in the same building?
Nate: Yeah. It's a 6-12. I think our incoming 9th grade class is going to be at least 80% people who were here in 8th grade. We have some loss of people outgoing from 8th grade and then we admit some new students. And then there is a little bit of matriculation in 10th and occasionally 11th.
[00:06:02] I don't think we really ever let in somebody just for their 12th grade year. Maybe we do it occasionally. But by and large, the pipeline is from 6th or 7th grade.
Priten: And how many students are there per grade level?
Nate: About 40, though they're trying to increase it slightly, but our building just is only so big. You have more problems with everything the more you scale. But they are trying to scale slightly.
Priten: And the parent buy-in—was that a cause or an effect of the school's approach? I'm wondering if the school does a lot of parent outreach to help them understand the policy decisions you all are making. That's a high level of buy-in, like taking phones away at night. That doesn't seem like it comes from just school.
Nate: I think it's a lot of parents who are already pretty tuned in. That's the great privilege of teaching where we do because our school is distinguished by its culture and that's what parents are paying for.
[00:07:10] We are a college prep school. We get kids into Ivys somewhat regularly, and it's very academically rigorous. But parents are also willing to drive a long way and pay tuition because they believe in the mission and the culture of the school. So we've self-selected for parents who are really intentional. It's not just like dropping their kid on our doorstep and saying "Get 'em into Harvard" and complaining if we don't. They are here for the culture and so they really care about their kids and they're invested. So of course we have trouble with some parents, like anybody, but by and large, the parents are really supportive of their students and also supportive of us. I think to answer your question: I think it's the kind of people who would make sure their kids turn off their phones at 9 PM are the kind of people who send their kids to BTA.
[00:08:08] Right.
Priten: Yeah, that makes sense.
Nate: And meanwhile, BTA is also focusing on that.
Priten: Right. There's some positive reinforcement there. So I'm curious about the students. You're right that a lot of students know how bad the technology is, yet there's a hard time fully navigating that relationship. What pushback are you getting from students, if any?
Nate: I haven't gotten really almost any pushback when I've confiscated a phone. My sense is that students hate unfairness. That goes for any rule—uniforms, food, cussing, whatever the rules are. If they feel the rules are being enforced arbitrarily or unfairly, they hate it. But if their sense is that anybody will get their phone taken away because the rule is actually enforced cleanly and uniformly, they tend to go okay with it.
[00:09:03] One thing we had to figure out this year is smart watches. The dean of students really handles this, but the academic dean, who's also the IT director, got in a couple arguments with students about their smartwatches because they're going like this during class. I came over and tried to take their watch away along with their phone and they're like "No, no. I was just checking the time." I'm like, no, you weren't. But a couple of times they were students who aren't shady, and they were like "No, seriously. I was really just checking the time." and they started to cry. So I was just like, all right, I'm not gonna die on this hill. But I think we need to strictly ban the smart watches. I think we are going to do that this year. There's no reason why they can't get a dumb watch if they need to know what time it is, and every room has a clock in it.
Priten: Yeah.
Nate: Like during a test, they're asking how much time they have left and there's a big analog clock right there.
[00:10:00] And then there's earbuds. So we are trying to enforce that if they have an earbud in, I'm also taking their phone because the earbuds are connected to the phone. Or you're using your phone essentially. Same with the smartwatch. So I think we're gonna—I'm pushing for just no smartwatches. They don't need it. There's something about the cross country runners and the track runners who might wanna track their data during practice, so they're gonna have to figure that out. And then there are some tricky issues that I don't know if they've resolved. The policy's supposed to be no phones in the building during the school day, but also even after school, if a student's still in the building.
Priten: Yeah.
Nate: They're not supposed to have their phones out. But then what if they're staying for a basketball game? And what if they're going to the basketball game—are we really gonna try to enforce it at the basketball game? So if I just want to go watch the basketball team, am I supposed to be policing whether the students are on their phones? Because of course they are. And what am I gonna do during the basketball game?
[00:11:02] Like, just because I happen to be there.
Priten: I'm curious about pushback against the low-tech approach. Are you hearing anything like "Why are you not using the technology when the technology is such a big part of the quote unquote real world?" It sounds like you have a lot of parent buy-in, but do you get that pushback from parents or students?
Nate: If we do, I haven't heard it. But that might be self-selected by the culture of the school.
Priten: Right.
Nate: When parents are shopping schools and they discern what kind of school we are and what we're doing and what we're not doing, they'll discern that we're not gonna focus on teaching them how to use any of the tools. So if that's what they really care about, they probably won't pick us. That's an interesting question. Part of the school's stance on this has been, even before AI, a sense that the tools they need to use, they'll figure out on their own. You didn't have to teach anybody to use Microsoft Word, Google, or anything like that.
[00:12:05] You just kind of figure it out. So we don't need to spend instructional time training on the tech because first of all, we don't use that much. But second of all, the students will figure it out when they need to. Things change quickly. So we don't wanna invest in teaching this thing that's gonna be obsolete soon. But as for parent pushback, I'm not really hearing it. If I did, I'd say something like: "No one will be using this in five years anyway, so don't worry about it."
Priten: Yeah, that's a nice pithy way to push back against that. And respectful.
Nate: Yeah.
Priten: The AI conversation. When we initially spoke, we talked mainly about teacher usage of it and the student plagiarism angle. I'm curious on both fronts. Do you all, as educators, use the technology in other ways outside of the classroom?
[00:13:06] And what is the school's guidance or stance on that?
Nate: As far as educators using it, there isn't a lot of official guidance. We're not discouraged from using it. We've tried to have conversations about having a heuristic: Am I using this in a way that I wouldn't, which is the same heuristic I want the students to have in mind. Am I using it in a way where I wouldn't mind telling my students that I used it? So if I'm using it to grade their papers in such a way that I think they would feel cheated if they knew that I did that because I was representing it as if I had done something that I didn't. So that's the heuristic I have in mind. And some of my colleagues don't use it at all. A lot of them are old school. But that's how I try to use it when I do. So if there's a video or I need quick practice exercises or comprehension questions to help the students track along, I'll ask ChatGPT and sometimes it's helpful and sometimes it's not.
[00:14:13] I wouldn't mind telling my students that I got this from ChatGPT, because I don't think they would mind. These are ten questions about this eight minute video that we watched in class. Whereas I do think they would mind if they knew that I just put their essays into ChatGPT and it gave me a score and feedback for them. Even though it would do a good job, maybe better than me. But that would feel like it's breaking an implicit contract that they did the work to write it with their hand, and I'm doing work to read it. And especially because it's relational. I only have 14 humanities 9th graders and we're in some kind of relationship where I am trying to help them with specific things on their writing—the way they formulate what they're saying and articulate themselves.
[00:15:06] So I'm the one reading it and it's my scrawled handwriting they can't read, trying to give them feedback. I use it for tasks like that. I'm tutoring a lot this summer and I found ChatGPT extremely helpful for rapidly generating grammar practice exercises. I'm teaching grammar to three or four students and if it's like "What's a dangling modifier and how do you fix it?" bam, you know, ten good exercises and it's even like "Oh, this kid likes soccer, so let's make them about soccer. Perfect. Or okay, now let's make it slightly more complicated. Let's mix them into a paragraph and they have to spot the errors and fix them." It's fabulous for that because it's so quick and so customized. I don't know what I'd be doing if I had to have a grammar workbook and flip through and then run out of problems for the kind that I need or can't find a problem that's the style I'm looking for. It's fabulous for that.
[00:16:00] Like if I was teaching grammar in the building, I would be using it all the time for that. A lot of my lesson plans for math are out of the box from, mostly from Math Medic. I'm guessing you've heard of it. It's a good resource. But I'm rarely using ChatGPT and I don't think most teachers are. I'm not using it for grading and I don't think most teachers are. I'm using it for a little bit of lesson planning or a little bit of dialoguing about things. Like if I'm really stuck on a topic, I might ask it to help me think about a better lesson plan. I'm not using it for any emails. Partly because our Google admin disabled the Gmail response suggestions.
[00:17:05] Which I like. It basically turned off the whole AI suite. But also, the emails I'm sending—I know I could draft them with ChatGPT, but it would take about as much time to get it to understand what I want and write it as it would take me to just write it.
Priten: Yeah.
Nate: So it's not a painful part of my life to write emails that need to be automated.
Priten: I've been drawing on the golden rule when I talk to teachers about how to both talk about the students but also approach themselves. You ought to think about being on the other side of any AI usage. I don't wanna read AI emails. When I see something that's AI written, I'm just immediately turned off. I don't feel engaged in this relationship anymore, even if it's fruitful for me in other ways because I no longer feel like you're invested in it.
Nate: Hmm.
Priten: So a good gut check is: if I were the student, would I want my paper graded like this? Probably not. So it makes sense that you don't use it that way. The use of AI by students outside of the classroom—what does that look like?
[00:18:00] Have you all changed formative assessments at all since we last spoke?
Nate: Good question. I don't know what other teachers are doing. In the ninth grade humanities class, we do almost all of the writing in class for assessments and in their reflection diaries. So they write in their reflection diary almost every day. And I read those, so I get a very good sense of their voice very quickly, and I really want them to just put their pen on the page. I believe the 10th, 11th, and 12th grade teachers are having them do writing assignments on Google Docs and research papers. I don't know what they're doing to put parameters around it. The school's policy is you cannot use AI tools unless you're explicitly given permission. I'm guessing most teachers are not giving permission for those kinds of things. I'm sure there's a certain amount of stuff—cheating, getting away with it. I would say at least half of our students. That might be high, but it's a lot more than I would've expected. At least, it's a weirdly high amount. But at least half of our students buy into wanting to learn to articulate yourself. You want to have your own voice. You want to be able to communicate your own thoughts. Therefore, you're cheating yourself if you're cheating. Try to say it yourself. Even if it's work, it might not be half, but a good amount are willing to do the work.
[00:19:04] We've had some issues—I've caught a couple of my students trying to cheat on different things. In my case, it's amazing that the student didn't think I would notice how much better the thing was they turned in than what they normally turn in. Like I somehow would believe that they wrote this. I'm kind of insulted. How dumb do you think I am? At least prompt it to sound dumber than this, or give it some of your work. Tell it to imitate you. Make this more convincing.
Priten: Right. Make this more challenging.
Nate: Yeah. It's just insulting. As far as math, I think both calculus and stats—80% of the grade is in-class assessments that they're doing with a pencil in front of me.
Priten: Yeah.
Nate: And I have taken to—given that I wasn't doing any completion grades for homework because I know you can just take a picture and ask ChatGPT. But by and large the students figured out, especially at the AP level, that first of all, it's not that much of your grade anyway, and the grade really is the test. So you're really just wasting your time and being dumb if you're using ChatGPT to get the answers instead of doing it because it's only marginally increasing your grade compared to if you just tell me you didn't do it.
[00:20:00] And you're gonna need to learn how to do it for the test. So occasionally I tell them: by all means, use it to check your answers. In many cases it will tutor you better than I will. It'll give you really clear instructions. So it just doesn't come up that often.
Priten: Yeah.
Nate: But that's kind of how the class is structured. I'm not sure what else my colleagues are doing or what trouble they're having with it. At faculty meetings, I've tried to—I'm the guy who's always talking about it. People always send me articles. But I'm trying, especially for the older people, to just have them understand what it can do so that it's in the back of their mind somewhere anytime they're assigning something. Put this into Gemini and just see what it gives you. You should have some awareness of how good these tools are so that you're not caught flatfooted—shocked that. I think especially the ones that are 50, 60, 70, 80. If they haven't tried it, they wouldn't believe.
Priten: Right. Yeah. It feels magical if you haven't actually done it yourself. I'm curious about the faith angle. Do you think that plays a role and has it played a role in how you explicitly talk about it? Because obviously that influences the culture of the school and can dramatically change the culture of the school in general. So it can dramatically affect how students approach it. And that's true across the country. But I am curious how those conversations intersect with conversations about faith.
[00:22:01] Nate: In particular with faith angles that are most salient, one would be integrity is a big deal. I think there are plenty of secular schools that go hard on integrity too. So it's not unique to Christianity. But it is a Christian principle. Trying to help the students understand what integrity is and why it matters, being honest and why it matters.
Priten: A lot of secular schools would say it's important, but robust character education or virtue education is kind of falling away. So I'm curious about how much of this is understood that integrity is important because you all are a faith-based school versus how much you are doing, even outside of technology, that reiterates the importance of integrity. Because I feel like that's different than intellectual understanding. A school can put it on their mission page, say it once a year. But the active work it takes to remind students, show examples, help them form the practice and techniques is very different.
[00:23:07] Nate: First of all, it comes up whenever we do go after any plagiarism or cheating, and we take it really seriously. There's a disciplinary committee and a meeting with the dean and some other students, and you could get suspended or expelled. And that happens every year. So, in a small enough school, word gets around. If somebody got caught cheating and got called into the dean's office, it scares you a little bit. The headmaster talks to all the students before both midterms and finals and reminds them why cheating is a bad idea. We as a faculty try to be models of honesty. We try not to be dishonest.
Priten: Right.
Nate: I feel like that's how I learned it the most. My parents literally never lied to me. They didn't tell me about Santa because they thought that'd be lying. So I knew lying was wrong because my parents just didn't lie.
[00:24:03] You know?
Priten: Yeah. I'm curious about other faith-based reasoning as well. I remember in college, a professor shared an article written by Simone de Beauvoir about the role of practice in school in building the practice of prayer. That really stuck with me. Even when things don't fully work out, or I can't see the point, or I'm feeling demotivated, I remember that habit-building activities help us build stronger habits for things that do matter, like prayer. It definitely stuck with me. Explicitly, schooling is an example of that. Like, even if we can't understand why, we still ought to sit and learn Latin. That kind of rigorous study can be reapplied in other contexts that feel meaningful to us. But I'm curious—when you're in the Bible, which is part of your ninth grade humanities class—you don't wanna SparkNotes the Bible, right? I'm assuming there's buy-in from students on that, because that feels distinctly different than not SparkNoting, I don't know, Great Expectations or something.
[00:25:02] Nate: Although I will say, in ninth grade humanities, it's not Bible study in the sense that we don't require that students are Christian. Most are, and we're very clear that we're Christian and only hire Christians. But many of the families are not. So every year, a couple of my ninth grade students are Chinese internationals and they've never seen a Bible before. We are trying to teach the Bible as a kind of literary and historical document. We're setting the ancient Jews in their historical context with the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Persians.
[00:26:01] We're comparing other creation narratives from the ancient near east. And we're setting Jesus in his historical context—what's going on in the Roman Empire. Who is Caesar? Who is Herod the Great? Who is Herod Agrippa? So we're teaching the Bible a little more as a historical and literary document than as a kind of "here's how you pray and here's how you do faith."
Priten: Right?
Nate: We do chapel every week, which is more like a church service, and that's where we sing and there's a sermon. In my class, I'm actually trying to challenge students. A lot of them are pastor's kids in the 9th grade community. So I'm trying to make it not like Sunday school for them. When they give me cliche Sunday school answers, I poke them.
Priten: Yeah. Yeah.
Nate: You read the book of Joshua, which is essentially a description of the Israelites more or less exterminating other people groups.
[00:27:07] In a kind of Holy War—like a celebration of Yahweh sent you to literally kill everyone, including women and children. And I teach it very critically, shall we say?
Priten: Yeah. Yeah.
Nate: Which is not the way you can teach it in Sunday school.
Priten: Yeah. Oh, that's really interesting. The narrative around reading in particular—I was talking earlier about how I'm concerned about how to get folks to appreciate the value of reading a text, a text longer than a caption on your Instagram post. I was curious if part of the motivation in that class is from faith, but it sounds like it's fairly disconnected and has a very historical lens to it. So you're—
Nate: We do want students to be able to sit and read a book, including the Bible or other spiritual literature. You can't grow spiritually unless you can pay attention to something for more than two minutes. Or sit. If you can't pray for more than five minutes without checking the phone, then you won't grow spiritually.
[00:28:03] Priten: Right.
Nate: So that's true. I also feel like even secular people know that too. But we're probably just more tuned into it because we are interested in spiritual formation as well.
Priten: Yeah. I think that's the thing—is there more buy-in on things we could all agree on when it's coming from a place of faith? There's a difference between knowing something is right for me versus knowing this is an act of faith for me. I was curious if that's changing how students show up in the classroom or the approach itself. You also have them from 6th grade, which I think is, or at least 80% of your students, which is another three years of formative schooling that you all get to influence. That's gotta be helpful. Do you notice a difference between your 9th grade students who've been in the school system and new students entering the school system?
[00:29:01] Nate: Definitely. Part of it is they can write better and read more. So they're more actually trained. Generally they're better at math too than the incoming ones. Especially if they're coming from the public school system. There's a lot of remediation we're doing with kids coming from the public school system. That'd probably be the main difference.
Priten: Like attention span, all that.
Nate: Yeah. And acculturation. They're used to wearing the uniform, used to not being on your phone. And in a really good way, we don't bully people. Kids are nice. So generally—
Priten: Right.
Nate: I mean, compared to how I was in 9th grade, it's wild. It's surreal sometimes when I compare these kids to me in 9th or 12th grade. I was such a worse human than they are.
Priten: Yeah. It's nice to hear of a context where these things are working. And I'm sure there's a lot that can be learned and reapplied in other contexts.
[00:30:00] Nate: One other thing I'll say on the theological angle, and I'm actually probably gonna write a paper about this. Theologically we're more focused, but I think everyone kind of knows this—relationality is so key to what it is to be human. Relationships are inherently frictiony. Technology is designed to eliminate friction. So if you wanna be in real relationship with real humans, it's awkward. You're gonna have conflict. You're gonna misunderstand each other. There are so many ways there's friction. That is what makes life meaningful. Relationship is really best done face to face, with your actual face. If we have theological rooting and that's what it is to be human, then it's maybe more obvious from that framework why a phone-based childhood is a dehumanizing thing.
[00:31:01] Priten: Right. Right.
Nate: And it's also more obvious why, if your parents are on their phones all the time, that's damaging. We as humans need connection and connection needs faces.
Priten: Right?
Nate: So a topic for another time—AI is going to, I would argue very soon, perfectly imitate consciousness. Whether or not it's conscious, it's gonna seem conscious to us. And therefore, on what basis will we try to dissuade our students from forming emotional bonds with them?
Priten: Yeah.
Nate: It's already a problem.
Priten: Right.
Nate: I mean, I haven't dated a chatbot yet, but I know some people are doing it and it's just gonna get better and better. So that's like a wave that's coming that I don't think people are quite ready for.
Priten: And this concerns me. There was a case of a student dying by suicide after they fell in love with a version of Denarius on one of the character AI sites. And then for some reason it ended, and the company got sued. But yeah, the emotional dependency on it is another angle that I don't think we're ready for. I think we're hyper-fixated on the intellectual angle right now. I think we're gonna get caught a little bit off guard. There are memes about this being the next relationship thing that Gen Alpha comes home with and you're navigating what is right and wrong—is this good for humanity or bad for humanity and all those things. But yeah, it's definitely on the horizon. If not already here. But I very much appreciate the opportunity to talk to you as always.
Nate: Have a great day.
Priten: You too. Take care.
Nate: Alright, cheers. Bye.
That was Nate speaking from a different school context than some of our other guests. The emphasis on face-to-face relationships and preserving friction in human connection offers a different framework for thinking about technology and education.
[00:33:00] Not everyone teaches in a context with this level of parent buy-in or institutional support for low-tech approaches, but Nate's experience raises important questions about what we're optimizing for and what we might be losing in the process. Stay with us as we continue the season exploring the intersections of technology, ethics, and education. For some case studies that look at these tensions in more detail, pre-order my book, Ethical EdTech at ethicaledtech.org.
Priten: Thanks for listening to Margin of Thought. If this episode gave you something to think about, subscribe, rate, and review us. Also, share it with someone who might be asking similar questions. You can find the show notes, transcripts, and my newsletter at priten.org. Until next time, keep making space for the questions that matter.