Dr. Grauer's Column - What’s a Blue Book?

What’s a Blue Book?
By Stuart Grauer

When I was in college in the 1970s, for almost all exams we were greeted with blue books on our desks, 9 inch by 6 inch lined booklets where we would answer all the questions in our own handwriting. They always had a light blue cover. On a particularly gnarly exam, someone might say, “Wow! I filled up three blue books!” Blue books were feared and revered. But the pages were small, so easier to get a page written.

When I worked at The International School of Bern in the 80s, the senior class English teacher famously gave so much writing that the head of school assigned her a grading assistant just to enable her to get some sleep at night.

As an upper and middle school teacher at that time, I still taught handwriting to my class. A little.

In the late 80s, I’m sure I filled up like 9 or 12 blue books a day for my doctoral comprehensive exams, where I wrote frantically nonstop for 4 hours, two days in a row. And imagine the teacher reading all that. (Thank you, Dr. Rost.)

In the 90s, we got computers. I worked at a school in Rancho Santa Fe that pioneered a keyboarding/typing program based on the behaviorist work of BF Skinner, and the computer printout was replacing the handwritten blue book entirely. By the 2000s, we had entered the age of cut and pasting: rampant plagiary accompanied by twenty or so years of weakening drone about the tragic loss of handwriting (mine has become terrible).

We could notate today as the quarter-century marker—2025: The Age of AI, and, in school, the age of artificial scholarship. (Plagiary is not even a strong enough word.) Or perhaps we can also herald the return of the blue book, as many schools are, and this just might make it possible really enjoy this new age and not have to resent it, at least in schools.

Computer printouts have had a pretty good run, 30-plus years, but many of us are looking at the glorious, burgeoning return of the blue book with curiosity. The reason:  The Great AI Cheating Crisis. The purpose of this column is to find some light in this crisis.

Researchers, and the founder of Chat GPT himself, Sam Altman, warn us that AI could run out of publicly available human-written text between 2026–2032, creating bottlenecks in meaningful progress. But a bottleneck has already hit practically every high school and college in the country: AI replaces the lion’s share of newly generated student thought. Why think?

Every school simply must have an “AI strategy” today, and, increasingly, I’m hearing about The Return of the Blue Book. Students will most likely dread it, in a good way somehow, but to me it sounds like folk music, an all acoustic show. Unplugged learning.

For a while we thought we might just redesign assignments so students can not be able to use AI. Well, if you want to find continuing evidence of student intelligence development, watch them outwit our efforts to forbid the use of AI. I don’t think it can be consistently done. Anything that can be cut and pasted can be generated by AI about as well but usually better than a student.

There could be only one answer: talk to the hand! 

I love student handwriting. I have always found that there is a connection between thinking and using our hands or bodies, as though connecting thought and physical action anchors it better in our brains. The theory is called embodied cognition and, among quite a few proofs, a 2014 Princeton/UCLA study found students who took handwritten notes remembered concepts better than those who typed.

The return to blue books also signals a giant step forward for what we were calling flipped learning around the time of that awful pandemic:  you do the reading and calculating at home, and class is the time to express it, live and in the flesh. Students can use all the AI in the world to prep their work, but once in class, they can be evaluated by their articulation and, at the end of the lesson or unit: the blue book!

I read in the Wall Street Journal that blue book sales are skyrocketing. (That’s actually what prompted this story.) But this is more than just an AI strategy: it is a return to relational education! 

Education was turning into a transaction: teacher assigns work > students cut and paste and print out (or download) assignment > teacher grades work, next… 

At The Grauer School, our mastery learning practice famously turns that transaction into a loop where the main learning can occur once the student gets the teacher’s marked up assignment back: this is a fantastic learning process.  But when a teacher gets an AI-assisted assignment, which they do all over the country, there is not much for the teacher to do: it becomes an infinite feedback loop and our students become more like observers than participants: Teacher generates cool assignment on AI > student generates cool homework and turns it in > teacher has AI grade it > sends it back to student for revision > repeat.

Unless the student completes the work authentically and the teacher grades it authentically.

The case here is simple: that original student writing can be done and shared in class, by hand, and that in class is a great place for that to take place. As in so many areas, this is a kind of schooling where smaller schools have a tremendous advantage because the intimacy of scale makes it almost impossible to hide — everyone’s voice is heard, and every page of handwriting belongs unmistakably to a person known in the room.

Outside of class, if students don’t have to deal with having AI do their homework, AI becomes something completely different for them:  AI is is a fantastic, amazing, exciting encyclopedia. AI is like hanging out with a really, really smart friend—a friend that is endlessly responsive to your curiosity. But for homework? What kid is curious about homework?

Thank you for giving all this some consideration. I was having daydreams about students creating their work on AI, teachers grading it in AI, and this whole artificial, circular conversation going on, a nightmare séance held by machines.

Back in medieval times, books were scare and almost all learning was oral. Memories were famously long. When I first studied navigation and coastal piloting, in that same scholastic tradition, every ship’s captain had a story about learning Bowditch’s American Practical Navigator’s 38 rules of the road in dozens of pages by heart.

This oral tradition remains also in university doctoral thesis “defenses” –and the Grauer School Senior Graduation Defenses are derived directly from this tradition: it is an oral defense and, after the presentation, the graduation candidate is sometimes grilled by peers and teachers. This is the very heart of Socratic dialog or just call it Q and A, but it’s original, engaging, challenging, and honest.  Student’s think on their feet and demonstrate what they have learned by heart.

By heart. Learning by heart. Remember that phrase? I have not heard that phrase around lately.  Why not! It went out with the Blue Book. Let’s not turn the whole of learning and teaching into a transaction. Real learning is embodied and Socratic. Learning by heart. Wow.

Learning by heart.

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