Is AI Making Students Worse At Sitting With Confusion? A Teacher’s Practical Observation
Last Wednesday, fifth period algebra, the room still smelled like buttered popcorn from the kid who snuck a microwaved bag in after lunch, I leaned over Javi’s shoulder to see what he was stuck on. The problem on his worksheet was a tricky factoring problem, the kind that needs trial and error with the middle term, no shortcut. Javi’s hoodie had a faded Creeper print, his phone buzzed face down on his desk, and he already had ChatGPT pulled up on his laptop. “I don’t get it,” he said, not even looking up at me. “Why waste time when this just gives me the answer in two seconds?”
I’ve been teaching 10th grade math for 12 years, and I’ve noticed a shift in the last three years, ever since generative AI became free and easy for every kid with a phone to access. It’s not that more kids are cheating, exactly. It’s that almost no one will sit with being stuck anymore. Five years ago, if I walked past a kid staring at a hard problem, they’d have three scribbled-out attempts in the margin, a crumpled paper ball in the trash, and a long list of half-formed questions they’d been turning over in their head for five or ten minutes. Now? The average kid will read the first line, sigh, and pull up AI before 60 seconds pass.
Last month I gave a no-technology quiz, open note, no phones, no laptops, just pencil and paper. There was one hard problem at the end that I knew would require a few minutes of trial and error to work through. Half my students left it completely blank. When I asked why after class, one girl said, “I just stared at it and I couldn’t think of anything. I kept waiting for it to make sense, and it didn’t, so I stopped.” That’s when it clicked for me: the skill we’re losing isn’t factoring or essay writing. It’s the ability to sit with confusion.
After class that day with Javi, he stayed back to pack his backpack and we talked a little. He told me his mom works full time, gets frustrated when he’s still working on math at 9 pm, and keeps telling him to just use AI to get it done so he can go to bed. “I feel dumb when I’m stuck for that long anyway,” he said, slinging his backpack over his shoulder. “If I can get the answer right now, why wouldn’t I?”
That makes total sense. No one likes feeling confused. It’s uncomfortable, it’s slow, it feels like you’re not good at the thing. But what a lot of people don’t realize is that confusion is where learning actually happens. When your brain is stuck, it’s stretching and building new connections that it never had before. If you jump to an answer before you finish that stretching, that connection never gets built. You end up with the answer, but you don’t end up with the skill to get the answer next time on your own.
I’m not anti-AI. I use it every week to generate extra practice problems and speed up writing feedback. It’s a good tool. But I’ve started testing small changes in my classroom, and I’ve shared them with parents who’ve noticed the same stuck-shutdown habit at home, and they’ve worked better than I expected. None of them require banning AI, which is impossible anyway, and they’re all low effort, no big schedule overhauls needed.
The first thing I do is set a clear 10-minute “stuck rule” at the start of every independent work period. No AI for the first 10 minutes, no asking the teacher or a friend for the answer, either. All you have to do is write down every wrong step you tried, and every question you have about what’s confusing. That’s it. Last week, Javi tried this. He wrote down “tried 2 and 3 for the middle term, that didn’t work. Tried 1 and 6, that was wrong. Wait, the last term is negative, right? Does that mean one number has to be negative?” Five minutes in, he tried -2 and 3, and it worked. He turned to me with this shocked little grin, like he couldn’t believe he’d gotten it on his own.
I tell parents to use the same rule at home, and add one simple phrase to use when their kid says they’re stuck: “What three things have you tried already?” It’s not a test, it’s just a nudge to get them to stop and think through what they know before they jump to AI. Javi’s mom told me she started using this a couple weeks ago, and it cut down on the homework fights more than anything else she’s tried. She still doesn’t understand algebra herself, so she doesn’t have to help. She just says the phrase, and Javi goes back to his desk to think instead of immediately opening AI.
The last small shift is just a tiny environmental adjustment: keep AI-enabled devices across the room for the first 15 minutes of homework. You don’t have to take them away entirely. If your kid is still stuck after 15 minutes, they can get up and grab it. Just the extra step of getting up means they’re more likely to spend those 15 minutes working through the confusion on their own, instead of mindlessly opening AI before they read the whole question.
This week, Javi got another tricky problem. He sat for 8 minutes, scribbled three wrong attempts, sighed, and raised his hand to ask a specific question instead of opening AI. He still got the answer wrong on his fourth try, but he didn’t shut down. He didn’t say he was stupid and give up. That’s the win, as far as I’m concerned.
We still have bad days. Some days Javi is tired after soccer practice and just uses AI to get his homework done in two minutes. I still have kids who leave hard problems blank on quizzes. We’re not rebuilding this skill overnight, after years of getting used to every question having an immediate answer. But small shifts, like 10 minutes of stuck time, one simple question, and a device across the table, add up. It’s not about getting rid of AI. It’s just about making sure kids learn to sit with the confusion first, before they ask a tool to fix it for them.
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