Why My 10th Grader Said ‘I Don’t Want To Use AI’ For School Work (And What We Did Next)
Sunday night, 8:17 according to the microwave clock. Leo’s hoodie is dotted with chocolate chip cookie crumbs, half a carton of oat milk sits open next to his laptop, and the screen is still blank. I’m folding laundry on the other end of the counter, and I glance over, remember he’s been working on his 5-page New Deal research paper for three days. “Didn’t you say you were going to use that AI tool to knock out the outline?” I ask. He pushes his laptop back an inch, crosses his arms, and says, clear as day: I don’t want to use AI.
I was caught off guard. For months, every parent group I’m in, every education newsletter I read, has been saying AI is non-negotiable. Kids who don’t learn to use it now will be unemployable in 10 years, they say. I’d even signed Leo up for a spring break workshop about AI for student writers before he ever shared how he felt. I was ready to argue, to tell him he can’t just opt out of the future, but something in his face made me pause. I asked him why.
He laid it out plain. His friend Jake used AI to write his whole Cold War essay the month before. Got an A, but when Ms. Henderson, his history teacher, pulled him aside to ask about one of the core arguments, Jake couldn’t explain it at all. He’d never even read the whole essay AI generated, just copied it into a Google Doc and turned it in. “I don’t want that,” Leo said. “I’m trying to get good at writing about history, because that’s what I want to do for college. If AI does the organizing for me, how am I supposed to get better?” He added that he loves digging through old primary sources, finding the weird little stories that don’t show up in textbooks, and he wanted his paper to sound like him, not a generic robot.
The next day, I was volunteering in the school library before first period and ran into Ms. Henderson. I asked her what she thought about a kid opting out of AI entirely. She said she gets at least two or three kids a semester who say the same thing, most often kids who have a clear idea of what they want to learn from a project. Her class policy is simple: disclose any AI you use, but no one is required to use it. “A tool’s only useful if it helps you reach your own goal,” she said. “If it gets in the way of what your kid wants to learn, forcing it is worse than not using it at all.”
That conversation helped us land on a middle ground that works for us, no hard rules on either side. First, we wrote down two clear agreements instead of me forcing the issue or Leo banning AI forever. Rule one: Any AI use is his call, for every assignment. If he’s stuck on a brainstorm and wants to use it, he can. If he wants to do the whole thing from scratch, that’s fine too. Rule two: If he does use it, he has to edit every line to make it sound like him, and be able to explain every part of the assignment if a teacher asks. That’s it, no lengthy lectures, no guilt trips.
Leo ended up spending three afternoons after school digging through the Library of Congress’s digitized WPA records, and he found a story I never even knew: our town’s first public library was built with New Deal money in 1935, and the first librarian was a 22-year-old woman who grew up 10 miles from here. He wrote his outline by hand first, typed up all his own notes, and kept stopping to read me lines he was proud of. When he got his paper back, he got an A-, and Ms. Henderson wrote in the margins: “This story feels alive because you found it and you told it. Great work.”
I’ve thought a lot since then about how much noise there is around AI in parenting circles. Everyone has a strong take: it’s cheating, it’s the future, you have to embrace it, you have to ban it. No one talks much about meeting your kid where they are. If you’re in the same spot, with a kid who says they don’t want to use AI, the small concrete things that worked for us are these: Don’t immediately assume resistance is laziness or fear of new technology. Ask three specific questions: What don’t you like about using AI for this? What do you get out of doing it yourself that you’d lose? What will you do if you get stuck and can’t finish on your own? That gives you actual information, instead of starting a fight you don’t need to have. Second, don’t force AI “to prepare them for the future” if it undermines what they’re learning right now. Leo knows he’ll almost certainly use AI in his future career, organizing archival notes, transcribing oral history interviews, that sort of thing. He’s even okay with that. He just doesn’t want to use it when he’s still learning the basics of how to research and write a clear argument.
Last week, Leo was stuck on a stoichiometry problem set for chemistry. I walked past his room, saw him with ChatGPT open on his second monitor. For a second I thought, okay, here we go, he changed his mind. Ten minutes later, he closed the tab, grabbed his backpack, and headed to the school’s after-school study group. He told me later that AI gave him the right answer, but it didn’t explain how to get it in a way that made sense to him. He got it wrong twice at study group, but by the third try, he figured it out, and he’s pretty sure he’ll remember it for the midterm.
I still see posts in my parent Facebook group every other week saying we’re setting our kids up to fail if we don’t make them use AI every chance we get. Sometimes I wonder if I’m being too lax, if I should push him more to practice. But right now, he’s clear on what he needs to learn, he’s confident in his choice, and he’s turning out work that matters to him. That’s more than I can ask for, for now.
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