What Happens When You Remove AI Access Midsemester? A High School Teacher’s Real Experience
Third period, mid-October, the scratchy carpet in my classroom still smells like the kid who spilled grape Gatorade there last week, and the bell just rang. I write the new argument essay prompt on the whiteboard—Argue for or against banning single-use plastics in our town—and watch the front row reach for their chromebooks. A sophomore named Lila refreshes ChatGPT, blinks, and says, “Wait, Ms. Henderson, you actually blocked it?”
The room erupts in groans. Javi, who’s been picking at a half-eaten cheese pizza in the back row all period, slumps back in his chair and says, “I’m failing this. No way I can write it without it.”
I’d gone back and forth for weeks before asking IT to block all generative AI sites for my classroom chromebooks, and reminded kids they couldn’t use it on personal devices for my assignments either. At the start of the semester, I’d taken the common line that AI is just a tool, like a textbook or a peer tutor, and it’s fine to use it to brainstorm or fix grammar. But by mid-October, I noticed a pattern. Kids turned in polished, well-structured essays that got solid A’s and B’s, but when I called on them to explain their argument during conferences, half of them froze. “I don’t know, that’s just what I wrote,” they’d say, staring at their shoes. Whole-class discussions fell flat—every take sounded identical, polished generic statements that could have been copied straight from a study guide. One parent emailed me asking why her son was getting A’s on at-home essays but C’s on in-class writing, and that’s when I decided to hit pause midsemester, just to see what would change.
The first two weeks were rough. The average grade on that first single-use plastic essay dropped 8 points, from a B+ to a C. I got essays with run-on sentences, half-finished ideas, tangents about how the lunch line runs out of vegan cookies anyway that had nothing to do with the prompt. I lay awake one night wondering if I’d just messed up an entire semester of kids’ grades for an experiment.
Then I started noticing the small shifts, first in how they talked about the material. We were reading The Crucible that unit, and before the block, our discussion about the witch trials went like this: one kid would raise their hand and say, “The Crucible is an allegory for McCarthyism that shows the danger of mob mentality,” everyone would nod, and we’d move on. No one added anything personal, no one argued.
A week after the block, I asked the same opening question about Abigail Williams, and a quiet kid named Zoe raised her hand and said, “Wait, I think she’s just a kid who got in over her head. If she told the truth at the start about dancing in the woods, everyone would have called her a liar anyway, right? Her uncle messed up everything more than she did.”
All of a sudden, 10 kids were talking over each other. Some said Abigail was just a manipulative villain, some said the whole town’s fear made her what she was. Javi, who hadn’t volunteered a comment all semester, yelled from the back, “She just wanted John Proctor, leave her alone! Everyone’s acting like they wouldn’t do some dumb stuff to get the person they like.” I hadn’t had that many kids participate in a single discussion all year.
Javi’s case drove the change home for me. He’d gotten B+ on every essay the first half of the semester, but he never spoke, never came to class for extra help. After he failed that first unassisted essay, he hung back after class, sat down on the beat-up couch by my door, and admitted he’d just been plugging every prompt into AI and changing a few words. He said he didn’t even read the whole essay before turning it in. We spent 20 minutes that afternoon going through the prompt again, and I had him write down three ideas he actually cared about on a piece of notebook paper, no fancy words allowed. His next essay got a C+, but when I asked him to explain his argument that social media makes high school drama feel way bigger than it actually is, he talked for five minutes straight, used examples from his own TikTok feed, and argued with me when I pushed back on his point. That’s more than I’d gotten out of him all semester.
After a few months of this, I’ve got a few concrete things I tell other teachers and parents who ask about it. It’s not about banning AI forever—if a kid has dyslexia and needs it to fix spelling and grammar after they write their own draft, that’s a perfectly good use. But if you notice your kid or your students aren’t actually engaging with the material, a midsemester pause can reset bad habits. For parents, if your teen comes home with an essay that sounds way more polished than anything they’ve ever written before, don’t start with accusations. Just ask them, “What’s the most boring part of writing this paper for you?” If they can’t answer, or say “It just came together,” that’s a good sign they’re letting AI do all the thinking. Instead of punishing them, sit down for 10 minutes and ask them to tell you one thing they actually think about the topic, before they start their next draft. For teachers, require all brainstorming and outlining to be done on pen and paper in class— that way, AI can’t do that messy, awkward work of forming an idea for you.
By the end of that first semester, the class average climbed back up to a B-, just a little lower than the B+ average we had the first half. But 80% of my students could explain their own arguments when I asked, up from 30% before the block. It’s not perfect. Some kids who relied on AI to catch up when they got behind are still building their study habits, and I’m still tweaking accommodations for kids who need extra support. This semester, I’m doing the same four-week midsemester pause, and yesterday Javi led a 15-minute debate about whether college is worth the debt, half the class yelling at him that he’s wrong, no generic takes, all their own words. I don’t know if this will work for every class, or every kid. But I’ve stopped worrying about perfectly polished essays, and started caring more about whether kids can think through their own messy ideas. That’s the part that’s going to matter to them later, anyway.
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