I Asked Three Different Teachers About AI This Week. None Gave Me the Same Answer.
Parent-teacher conferences wrapped up at our district this week, and I left with a crumpled flyer for the spring book fair, a sticky cherry lollipop I got from the 2nd grade volunteer table, and way more questions than I walked in with. I’ve got a 7th grader, Lila, and a 2nd grader, Milo, so I’m bouncing between two totally different school worlds right now, and AI is one of those things that’s suddenly everywhere if you know where to look, but totally invisible if you don’t ask. I’ve seen all the hot takes on my local parent Facebook group—half the people screaming that schools are letting kids cheat their way through high school, the other half screaming that schools are falling behind and will leave our kids unemployable. I figured I’d just ask the people actually in the classroom, see what’s going on.
First up was Lila’s 7th grade English teacher, Mrs. Henderson. She’s been teaching here 28 years, always wears those chunky cream knit cardigans with faint coffee stains on the cuffs, keeps a cold brew in a mason jar that says “Pardon My Take” on the side. I brought up Lila’s book report on The Giver first, because I’d caught her a month prior asking AI to spit out a basic outline for her arguments. I’d panicked a little at first, hovered over her shoulder like “is that allowed?” and she just rolled her eyes and said “Mrs. H says we can use it for outlines, we just can’t turn the whole thing in.” Turns out that’s exactly what Mrs. Henderson told me. She doesn’t ban it. She says she reworked her entire essay requirement this year: any draft, AI or human-written, gets brought to class, and we work on rewriting it together. She told me about a boy last semester who turned in a totally flawless AI essay on To Kill a Mockingbird, no grammar mistakes, perfect argument, but it didn’t have the thing he told her he wanted to write about—how his grandma, who marched in Alabama in the 60s, came to visit and talked about meeting Atticus-like people when she was a kid. So now she requires that every essay has at least one messy, personal tangent that doesn’t tie directly to the prompt. AI can’t write that, she said. If it doesn’t have that, it doesn’t get a passing grade. I thought that was pretty smart, honestly.
But then I talked to Lila’s algebra teacher, Mr. Torres, who’s 26, just started here two years ago, and his approach could not be more different. He blocks all AI tools on the classroom Wi-Fi, requires every student to turn in all their scratch work with every test and homework assignment, and if he catches you using AI to solve a problem, you get a zero. I didn’t call him out or anything, just asked why the totally opposite approach from Mrs. Henderson. He leaned against his desk and sighed, said last semester he let kids use it if they wanted to check their work, and by midterm, half the class couldn’t solve a basic two-step equation on their own. They’d gotten so used to AI breaking it down for them that they froze the second they had to start from scratch. “I don’t care how good the tool is,” he said. “If you can’t do the work when the Wi-Fi goes out, or when you don’t have your phone, what’s the point? I’m not teaching kids to prompt an AI. I’m teaching them how to work through a problem when they don’t know the answer right away.” That also made sense. I left that meeting just confused, because two smart, caring teachers had two totally opposite takes, and both felt right.
Over at the elementary school, Milo’s 2nd grade teacher Ms. Lee has a whole other approach. She’s been having the kids use AI to generate ideas for art projects. Last month they did a monster unit, and she let them type in a description of what their monster likes to eat and how many heads it has, AI spits out a base drawing, and the kids color it and write their own backstory. Milo came home with a purple three-headed monster that only eats broccoli, it’s taped to our fridge right now, one eye colored bright orange for no reason he can explain. Ms. Lee just laughed when I asked about AI rules. She said it’s just another supply, same as crayons or construction paper. If it helps a kid who’s stuck get an idea, great. If a kid wants to draw their whole monster from scratch, that’s also great. The only problem, she said, is the PTA had a huge screaming match about it at the last meeting. A handful of parents pulled their kids out of the after-school tech club because the club is teaching basic AI skills, said it’s rotting their kids’ creativity. The other half yelled back that if the school doesn’t teach it now, they’ll be behind when they get to college. Ms. Lee just said she stays out of it, does what works for her kids in her classroom.
I chaperoned Milo’s field trip to the science museum last week, and while we were waiting in line for the planetarium, a group of parents got into that exact argument. I stood there eating a Sour Patch Kid I stole from Milo’s backpack, didn’t say anything. Because I don’t know what the right answer is. I caught Lila using AI to make flashcards for her history quiz last week, she forgot to study the night before, and she got a B+ which is way better than she usually does when she crams. I still nag her sometimes about not relying on it too much, even though I can’t really argue with the grade. I guess I’m just as much of a fumbling mess as everyone else. When I was in high school, I used CliffNotes to get through books I didn’t have time to read. No one yelled that that was the end of education. Is this really that different?
The district sent out a big parent survey about AI policies last month, asking what we think they should do. Most of the questions were just vague, like “Do you support responsible AI integration in K-12?” What does responsible even mean? I checked “no opinion” and closed the tab. No one I’ve talked to, not the teachers, not the admins, not the other parents, has this all figured out. The principal just smiled and told me “we’re working on a unified policy” when I asked, which is admin-speak for “we don’t know either.”
I drove home from conferences last night, Lila was in the back seat scrolling TikTok, Milo was half asleep covered in chocolate chip cookie crumbs from the PTA table, and I just thought that’s probably how it’s gonna be for a while. No big perfect plan, no one right answer, just a bunch of teachers and parents fumbling around with something new, figuring it out as we go. Some people ban it, some people use it like crayons, some people meet it in the middle. I don’t know if it’s gonna turn out that our kids are all cheating cheaters who can’t write a sentence, or that they’re all super prepared for whatever comes next, or whatever the hot takes say. I just think about what Mrs. Henderson said, about that messy personal tangent that AI can’t write. That part’s still up to the kid, right? No matter what the tool does, that part’s still theirs. That’s the only thing I’m sure of right now. (Word count: 1182)
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