Is AI Making Students Worse At Sitting With Confusion? A Teacher’s Observation And Tips
The hum of my 7th grade math classroom’s air conditioner was mixing with the scratch of pencils on paper last Wednesday when I stopped at Mia’s desk. She was staring at a multi-step equation problem, her notebook still blank except for her name at the top. Before I could even ask how it was going, she tapped her phone screen open and pulled up her AI chat app. I leaned against the edge of her desk. “What’ve you tried so far?” She shrugged, not looking up from the screen. “I don’t get it. Why waste 10 minutes being confused when this can just give me the answer in 10 seconds?” A crumpled granola bar wrapper slid off her notebook onto the floor as she shifted in her chair. I picked it up and tossed it in the trash on my way past, and that question stuck with me.
That night, I saw the same thing play out at my kitchen table with my 10-year-old, Leo. He was working on a science vocabulary crossword for homework, and got stuck on a 5-letter term for igneous rock formed from lava. Before he could even sound out the clue a second time or flip back through his textbook notes, he was yelling for Alexa to answer it. When I told him to put the Alexa down and think for a minute, he groaned: “It’s just confusing. I don’t want to do it.”
I’ve been teaching middle school for 12 years, and I’ve noticed a clear shift in the last three years, since free AI tools became easy for every kid to access. It’s not that kids are cheating more, exactly. It’s that they almost never sit with that uncomfortable, messy feeling of not knowing, not even for two minutes. They reach for a tool to fix the confusion immediately, before they’ve even had a chance to untangle what they do and don’t understand.
Confusion isn’t a sign that you’re bad at learning. It’s the part where learning happens. When you sit with not knowing, you start sorting through the stuff you already know to see what fits. You test out wrong ideas, you notice where you hit a wall, you build the muscle to keep going when things don’t click right away. If you skip that step and get the answer immediately, you don’t just miss the practice—you start to think that any confusion means you can’t do the problem, that you need outside help before you even try.
Last semester, I had a student named Nico who turned in perfect homework every single night for six weeks. Every problem was right, every step written out clearly. Then he got a 38 on our unit test. After class, he told me he’d used AI for every homework problem. He said he thought he understood it, because he could follow the steps AI wrote down, but when he sat down with a blank test page and no AI, he couldn’t even remember where to start. He’d never practiced sitting with the confusion of working through a problem from scratch on his own.
I don’t want to ban AI in my class, and I don’t tell parents they have to take all devices away from their kids at home. AI is a useful tool—great for walking through a concept after you’ve tried the problem, great for checking your work, great for answering random questions that pop up while you’re researching. The problem is only when it’s the first place kids go, not the last. So I’ve made three small changes that are working pretty well so far, that any parent or teacher can copy.
First, I have a hard 2-minute rule for anyone who says they’re stuck. Before you can ask me for help or pull out your phone for AI, you have to spend 2 full minutes writing down every single thing you know about the problem, even if it seems obvious. For a math problem, that might be “This is an equation, I need to get x by itself, there are parentheses on the left side.” For a reading response question, that might be “The main character was mad at her friend, this question is asking why that matters.” It doesn’t have to be right, it just has to be something. That 2 minutes gets kids past that initial “I don’t get it” panic and forces them to sit with the confusion just long enough to start untangling it.
Second, I changed what I say when kids tell me they’re stuck. I don’t say “let me help you” anymore. I say, “What’s one thing you know for sure here?” It sounds small, but it stops the immediate reach for an outside answer. It makes them pause and think instead of shutting down. At home with Leo, I use the same line when he yells that he’s stuck on homework. Last week, when he was stuck on that same crossword, I said it, and he paused, then said “Well, it starts with B… I think it’s basalt?” Which was right. He just needed that nudge to sit with the confusion for 10 seconds instead of running to a device.
Third, I tell kids they can use AI after they’ve tried the problem, not before. If they work through it on their own, write down their answer, and then they can check it with AI and see where they went wrong. That uses AI as the tool it is, instead of a crutch that skips the hard part.
It’s not a perfect fix. I still catch kids pulling up AI before they’ve written a single word, Leo still yells for Alexa when I’m not looking, and there are days when I’m tired and I just look up an answer for him instead of making him think. I don’t know if this shift is permanent, or if kids will get used to balancing AI use with that messy practice of learning to sit with not knowing. But I do know that confusion isn’t something we need to fix for kids immediately. It’s something they need to practice sitting through, one 2-minute block at a time. Right now, that’s the best we can do.
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