In an article in today’s New York Times (Nov. 25, 2025), “I’m a Professor. A.I. Has Changed My Classroom, but Not for the Worse,” Nabokov features in a return to the blue book.
Many teachers have changed the way they test students. That often means returning to old-school pen-and-paper exams — thereby contributing to the comeback of the blue book, a horseshoe-crab-like relic of primordial ed tech that A.I. has saved from extinction….
Here is the reference:
Scott Saul, at the University of California, Berkeley, told me that he has started giving five-minute pen-and-paper quizzes that (unlike a midterm or a final) ask for details from the text and no interpretation at all, an idea he got from Nabokov. Saul told me, “Nabokov would give these impossible quizzes in his Cornell classes” — like in “Anna Karenina,” what did Anna’s son receive as a birthday present in 1875? “And I’d be like, ‘That is so nitpicky, this guy is insane.’” But Saul came to see the point. “All of the bigger forces in our culture are pulling people away from deeply attentive reading,” he said. “People lack patience with the detail that makes an essay or a story or a novel have texture and depth,” especially when they’re used to having everything reduced to bullet-point summaries or skipping over large chunks of prose as they scan on a screen. Such tech-assisted breezing through a text is to reading a novel roughly as listening to a podcast about marriage is to being married. Nitpicking Nabokovian quizzes are one way to reinforce getting down into the details where meaning resides. I also have students scan and turn in their mark-ups — underlinings, marginal notes, highlighting — of the hard copy they’re reading, which is as close as I can get to watching them think as they read.