What Happens When Your Kid’s ICT Class Teaches Using AI To Solve Equations
Last Tuesday, I was folding clean soccer laundry at the kitchen table while my 10th grader crammed in homework before practice. A half-eaten bowl of mac and cheese sat next to his laptop, steam gone cold, when he pushed it toward me and said, “Stop bugging me about showing my work. My ICT class says I can use AI to do the equations.”
I froze. I still think of ICT as the class where you learn to format a research paper and avoid phishing emails. I’d scrolled the PTA threads panicking about kids using AI to cheat on math homework, and here was my own kid saying his teacher told him to do it. I leaned in, expecting to see a hidden tab he didn’t want me to see, but the assignment was right there in the class learning management system: Unit 4: AI as a Problem-Solving Tool. Task: Input 12 quadratic equations into your chosen AI tool, record the output, and identify any results that don’t fit the context of the problem.
I’d already scheduled a parent-teacher conference for the following week, so I made a point to sit down with his ICT teacher, Ms. Lopez, to ask what was going on. She leaned back in her chair, sipped from a chipped iced coffee cup, and told me she didn’t design this unit on a whim. Three years ago, she caught three-quarters of her class using AI to complete math homework for other classes when they were supposed to be talking about digital responsibility. Banning it didn’t work—kids just hid it, lied about it, and never learned what it could and couldn’t do. So she reached out to the 10th grade math team to work out a collaboration.
By the time kids do this ICT assignment, she explained, they’ve already spent three weeks in math class solving quadratics by factoring and completing the square. Every kid has taken a quiz proving they can work through the steps on their own, no tools allowed. The ICT unit isn’t about replacing that learning—it’s about teaching kids how to interact with a tool that’s already part of their lives, for better or worse.
I watched my son work through the assignment that night, and that’s when I started to get it. He plugged in the first problem, AI spat out x = 2 and x = -5. The problem was about finding the side length of a new garden, so a negative length didn’t make any sense. He circled that wrong answer on his worksheet, wrote “AI forgot this is a real-world problem” and moved on. Halfway through, he hit one he’d messed up when he tried it by hand earlier that week for math homework. He compared AI’s steps to his, saw he’d messed up the sign when factoring, and fixed it without throwing his pencil across the table. I’d never seen him do that before—usually he’d just erase the whole thing and give up if he got it wrong the first time.
I talk to a lot of parents who immediately panic when they hear AI is being used for math work in school, and I get it—I was there, panicking right along with them before this. But what I’ve learned from this experience is that the first, simplest thing you can do as a parent isn’t run to the principal to complain. It’s ask one specific question: Has my kid already learned how to do this skill by hand? If the answer is no, that’s a valid concern, and you can email the teacher to ask what the purpose of the assignment is. If the answer is yes, AI just becomes a tool, the same way the graphing calculators we all used in high school were tools, once we got past the basic unit on solving equations by hand.
I’ve started a tiny, low-effort routine at home that works for us, no big fights or constant monitoring required. If my kid is using AI for any math work, I just ask three quick things before he turns it in: Show me one problem you did by hand first. Tell me why AI’s answer does or doesn’t make sense for the problem. If AI got it wrong, what do you think the right answer is? It takes 30 seconds, it doesn’t turn homework time into a battle, and it keeps him from just copying everything blindly without thinking. Last month, he forgot to do that check on a math quiz, copied AI’s negative height answer for a projectile motion problem, and got the whole question wrong. He came home annoyed at himself, not at me or the rule, and that mistake stuck with him far more than any lecture I could have given.
I still have plenty of uncertainty about this, honestly. I worry sometimes that when he’s rushing through homework after practice, he’ll skip the by-hand step too often and get rusty. Last week, I caught him using AI to check three problems in a row without doing them first, and we had a quick reminder about the routine. He complied, no eye-rolling (well, only a little), and fixed it. It’s not a perfect system. There’s no neat, wrapped-up ending to this—AI isn’t going away, and we’re all figuring it out as we go.
But what this ICT class taught me, more than it taught my kid, is that pretending AI doesn’t exist isn’t working. Banning it from classrooms just pushes it underground, where kids don’t learn how to spot its mistakes or use it to their advantage. My kid doesn’t just know how to solve quadratic equations anymore. He knows how to check if the tool he’s relying on got it right, and that feels like a more useful skill for the world he’s going to graduate into than memorizing every step by hand ever could. Right now, that’s enough for me.
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