The Professor Fighting AI With Typewriters
buck the trend: to do the opposite of what most people are doing or what is generally happening
When the students walked into class, a machine that many had only seen in movies sat on their desks. Cornell University German instructor Grit Matthias Phelps was tired of grading papers written by AI. Her solution: typewriters. Every semester she makes her students write the slow way, with no screens or AI assistance. Phelps praises the benefits of typewriters. She said, “Everything slows down. It’s like back in the old days when you really did one thing at a time. And there was joy in doing it.”
Phelps is not alone. Many teachers are now forcing students to write with pen and paper. But not all young people need to be pushed. Some are choosing for themselves to live a more analog life. Across the United States and Europe, a growing number are bucking the trend they were born into.
In some cities, young people meet in apartments, leave their phones at the door, and spend two hours reading, drawing, and talking. There are “Offline Clubs” in Europe. In Brooklyn, the “School of Radical Attention” runs workshops to help people focus without their screens. Some go further and give up their smartphones completely.
The reason is simple. They are tired of feeling owned by algorithms, and they want their real lives back. The psychologist Jonathan Haidt calls it “a self-correction back toward real-world connection.”
Sample sentences
Most of her friends bought big houses, but she bucked the trend and moved into a tiny apartment to save money.
When everyone panicked and sold their stocks, he bucked the trend and bought more.
While other shops raised their prices, this little cafe bucked the trend and kept its coffee cheap.
Origin
“Buck” comes from the way a horse kicks and jumps to throw off its rider. To buck something is to resist or push hard against it, so to buck the trend is to push against the direction everyone else is going.
Read More
A college instructor turns to typewriters to curb AI-written work and teach life lessons (AP)
Meet the millennial and Gen Z ‘attention activists’ who are trying desperately to unplug from their phones (Fortune)
