The Pendulum Is Swinging Again — And Teachers Are Caught in the Middle. Again.

Jul 25

BY: AMANDA CARDENAS

Part One of a series on analog, tech, and the classrooms caught in between

It feels like just minutes ago that everyone was scrambling to upload entire courses onto Google Classroom and Canvas, teaching themselves how to be online teachers, and in a full-blown panic to see how many of our classroom practices could be streamlined with tech.

Now? The wake-up call that maybe we did too much too fast is dawning.

If you've been in education long enough, you know this feeling. You know the pendulum. You've watched it swing toward whole language and back to phonics, toward open-concept, flexible seating classrooms and back to rows of desks, toward 1:1 devices and now — apparently — all the way back to paper and pencil.

And before I say anything else, I want to say this:

If you're exhausted by the swinging, you're not being dramatic. You're being observant.

Because here's what the pendulum actually asks of teachers: build a system. Refine it for years. Troubleshoot it alone. Get good at it. And then — right around the time it finally works — tear it all down and start over, because someone above your pay grade made a decision about your classroom without ever setting foot in it.

That's not a professional development cycle. That's whiplash.

The mistake we can't afford to make

Let me be clear about something, because I don't want to be misread here: the concerns driving this swing back from tech are legitimate. Screen fatigue is real. Tech becoming the default "free time" activity is real. The reliance on bad, and in many cases harmful, testing and instructional platforms is real. The quiet erosion of handwriting, sustained attention, and eye contact? Real, real, real.

Teachers have been raising these flags for years. You've earned the right to say "this isn't working" — and you should keep saying it, loudly, whenever you see it.

But there is a difference between naming a problem and blaming a scapegoat. And too many district conversations right now sound like the second one:

Tech is the problem. Get rid of tech. Moving on.

Blame, eliminate, move on.

Here's why that scares me: blame takes away all of the critical thinking around the problem. The moment we decide the Chromebook did it, we stop asking what was actually happening in the assignment, the assessment, the routine, the task design. We remove the nearest organ and call it surgery.

Imagine, instead, if our school conversations sounded more like this:

"Before we get rid of something, have we taken steps to truly diagnose the issue?"
"Tech and assessment seem to be causing some issues. Let's address that."
"Let's spend some PLC time to narrow down which strategies are best performing with tech and which are not."
"I'm concerned about tech becoming a default free-time activity for kids. Are you seeing the same thing?"

Notice who those questions center? Teachers. The people with the authority, the autonomy, and the front-row knowledge of what's working, when, why, and where the problems actually live. Diagnosis requires practitioners. Pendulums only require a vote.

The two questions that cut through the noise

After thirteen years in a secondary ELA classroom, I can tell you the medium was never the point. The intention was always the point. And when I need to decide whether something belongs on paper or on a screen, I run it through two questions:

1. What is this serving? 2. Who is this serving?

That second question matters more than people realize — because sometimes the answer is students. Sometimes the answer is teachers. And sometimes it's genuinely both, and those are the decisions worth protecting with your life.

Here's my favorite example, because it lives right on the fault line of this whole debate: essay writing and essay grading.

Is drafting essays on a computer complicated right now? Absolutely. Between AI and the blank-screen scaries, there are real reasons to think carefully about where student composing happens. That's a legitimate, ongoing diagnosis — not a settled question.

But grading online? Giving feedback on digitally submitted essays? That was one of the most revolutionary changes of my entire teaching career. Because I lived the before-times: hauling home stacks of papers, grading by hand, watching the turnaround time stretch from days into weeks. And here's the thing — that didn't just hurt me. It hurt my students. Feedback that arrives three weeks late isn't feedback anymore; it's an autopsy. Digital grading made helpful, specific, timely feedback actually possible.

So if a district goes full stop, zero tech, no exceptions? They haven't eliminated a problem. They've eliminated a teacher's ability to do one of the most important parts of the job well — and students pay for that too.

One task. Two mediums. Two different answers — because the composing and the feedback serve different purposes and different people. That's what diagnosis looks like. That's the level of nuance a pendulum can't represent fairly.

And that's exactly why zero-tolerance, all-or-nothing district decisions are so problematic. They don't just overcorrect — they overwrite the professional judgment of the only people positioned to know the difference.

You're allowed to HAVE both

So if you've been feeling caught in the middle — nodding along when someone names the real problems with screens, and also quietly panicking about losing the tools that keep your workload survivable — I want you to hear this:

That's not fence-riding. That's expertise.

You're allowed to bring tech problems to the table and defend the tech that's working. You're allowed to want fewer screens in some parts of your day and more infrastructure in others. Noticing a problem with technology doesn't make you anti-tech, and defending a digital tool doesn't make you a sellout to Silicon Valley. It makes you a professional doing the diagnostic work your district should be asking for.

A few free resources that live in the sane middle

If you want to see what intentional, filter-tested back-to-school decisions look like — some analog, some digital, all on purpose — start here:

The Annotated Me — a rigor-forward introduction activity that puts annotation skills to work on day one.
My Life in 15 Seconds — a routine-builder that gets students composing and creating inside your systems from the very start.
My Top Nine — my favorite relationships freebie for getting to know students fast.
The original First 10 Days blog post — the one that started it all, with the three pillars that anchor everything I do: Routines, Rigor, and Relationships.

The cautionary tale we should all be sitting with

Before I let you go, I want to leave you with the story that, to me, proves why all of this matters. It's about cell phones.

For years — close to a decade — teachers begged for help with phones. Begged. We asked districts and administrators and anyone with decision-making power to create school-wide policies, to put the ownership of that rule on the higher-ups instead of leaving it to individual classrooms. And for years, the answer was silence. So teachers did what teachers do: we figured it out alone. We built phone hotels and pocket charts and point systems. We fought that battle one class period at a time, without backup, and slowly, painfully, many of us found systems that worked.

And then — eight, ten years later, after teachers had bled for their solutions — state governments finally got involved and started banning phones from classrooms. The support arrived a decade late, dressed up as a brand-new idea, and once again teachers were told to tear down their systems and adapt.

I'm not saying the bans are wrong. I'm saying the pattern is wrong. When the people making sweeping decisions aren't listening to the people living the problem, even the right policy arrives broken.

That's the pattern we're about to repeat with this tech pendulum — unless the conversation changes. Unless it starts with diagnosis. Unless it starts with you.

Coming up next in this series...

In the next post, I'm breaking down one of the most misunderstood decisions in my own classroom: why my bell work routine stays digital — full stop — and what it actually costs students when it doesn't. (Hint: it has almost nothing to do with convenience and everything to do with equity.)

And if you're ready to practice this kind of decision-making right now — running every back-to-school choice through what is this serving and who is this serving — that's exactly what we do together, for ten straight days, inside The First 10 Days: The Complete Back to School Toolkit.You bring your classroom. I'll bring the framework.

What is your school talking about for next year? Full analog? Doubling down on devices? Somewhere in the sane middle? Tell me in the comments — I'd genuinely love to hear what these conversations sound like where you are. The pendulum swings a lot slower when we're all holding onto it together.