Educators urge students to write as AI grading spreads

undisclosed AI – A New Orleans educator and graduate student at the University of New Orleans says writing remains hard for everyone—and urges students to keep drafting, revising, and collaborating rather than relying on AI to complete or grade their work, after an article des

For Katie Wills Evans, teaching writing now comes with a warning she delivers before the semester even begins: writing is hard for everyone. She says she loves writing and still “hate[s] doing it a lot of the time,” and that the only way through is practice—especially when the impulse hits to stop.

This is not an argument delivered from comfort. Evans’ own school story is marked by disruption and change. She says her life has changed since her time as a Voices of Change fellow during the 2023 school year. when the school she “loved and helped build” later closed. With support from her fellowship editor. Cobretti Williams. Evans applied to and was admitted to the Creative Writing Workshop at the University of New Orleans. where she is taking graduate classes and teaching a freshman English composition course.

Teaching, she says, has pushed her to turn her private struggle into something students can use. While designing the first college course she taught, she wrote a letter to her students. In it. she describes writing as something that starts with an uncomfortable choice: sit down. begin anyway. keep going through the moments when you want to quit. She frames that persistence as an act of becoming—the “you” who can do the things they want rather than waiting for tomorrow.

That message runs straight into a misconception she hears often from students: “I don’t know what to write.” Evans argues that students treat that sentence as proof they are not ready. as if writing is simply transferring already-formed knowledge onto paper. She says this belief is shaped by how finished products dominate what people see—the “published novel. ” the “final cut. ” the social media post that shows the outcome rather than the process.

Her counterpoint is drafting. She tells students to try before they feel sure, to finish something even when it isn’t “good” yet. Then comes revision. which she describes as more than polishing—revision insists that what you have can become something different. something better. and it trains people to hold multiple possibilities in their heads at once. Along the way. feedback and clearer goals do something practical: they help students articulate what they want and move closer to it.

And when students and teachers do this work together—even with uncertainty—Evans says the classroom becomes a form of real collaboration. Both grow, she writes, through “building the world we want.”

Just as she is pressing those points. Evans says the world around her is shifting in a way that makes students’ writing feel easier to sidestep. “Just this week. ” she writes. an article came out detailing pervasive. undisclosed AI use to grade and give feedback to student writing in some New Orleans schools. In the same sweep of worry. she points to a study conducted in May of 2025 that found 84 percent of high school students used generative AI to complete their school work.

Evans doesn’t dismiss the temptation. She describes the overwhelm educators and students face. and she understands the “temporary relief” that cognitive offloading with AI can provide. But she argues that the trade—stepping away from the writing process itself. from feedback. from revision unfolding in real time—is far larger than the short-term gains.

Her question lands hard: what kind of world are schools building if the human work of communication through writing gets delegated to machines?

From there, she pushes for a different set of priorities and classroom conditions. Evans says educators and administrators should “re-evaluat[e] our priorities,” taking on fewer assignments for longer. She calls for redesigning curricula and systems so teachers have the capacity for repeated contact with students through their written work—so teachers can actually know students. not just score their output.

The urgency in Evans’ writing isn’t abstract. She describes it as a feeling that the present has pulled them into a different world than the one she grew up in and was educated for. She also says these times—despite people saying they are not—are “precedented. ” and she turns for guidance to Black women writers.

She names Toni Morrison, Toni Cade Bambara, Audre Lorde, and June Jordan as sources of direction. She says Morrison. in 2004. described “a burgeoning ménage a trois of political interests. corporate interests and military interests” working to “literally annihilate an inhabitable. humane future.” And she says Audre Lorde’s words—“In this way alone we can survive. by taking part in a process of life that is creative and continuing. that is growth”—have steadied her.

In the face of what she describes as a world that would automate people “right out of existence. ” Evans ends with a plain insistence: she wants students—and educators—to write anyway. The work is difficult, she acknowledges. But survival, in her telling, runs through participation in the creative process.

Evans’ story appears as part of an EdSurge series chronicling diverse educator experiences. The series is made publicly available with support from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. EdSurge maintains editorial control over all content. The work is licensed under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

writing instruction AI in education generative AI AI grading student writing New Orleans schools University of New Orleans English composition drafting and revision