What I Learned Covering AI in Education As A Journalist (And What Parents Actually Need To Know)
The 11th grade English room smelled like dry-erase marker and leftover caramel popcorn last October, when I sat in the back to observe a lesson for a story I was working on. Half the kids had their laptops open, backpacks slung over the backs of their chairs, when Ms. Henderson called on essays about a personal grief or loss. A 16-year-old named Mia raised her hand halfway through the share-out. “I need to be honest,” she said. “I used ChatGPT to outline this.”
The room went quiet for half a second. I leaned forward, pen ready, expecting the lecture I’d come to write about: cheating, plummeting skills, the end of writing as we know it. Instead Ms. Henderson nodded. “What did it do for you that you couldn’t do yourself?” she asked.
Mia twisted the end of her braid. “This is about my grandma’s dementia,” she said. “Every time I tried to sort my memories, I started crying and couldn’t get anything down. AI just helped me put all the random moments into order. I wrote every word of the actual essay, and I moved the cookie baking part to the front because AI put it at the end and that’s the most important part.”
After class we talked for 20 minutes by the classroom door, while Ms. Henderson graded exit tickets and kids ducked out to go to soccer practice. I’ve covered education for seven years, and before that visit, I’d only written the same two takes you see everywhere: AI is going to revolutionize learning for good, or AI is going to destroy a whole generation of critical thinkers. That afternoon changed that.
I have an 8th grader, and six months before that visit, I’d yanked his laptop closed when I saw ChatGPT open while he worked on a book report for The Giver. I got that tight chest feeling all parents get when we think our kid is cutting corners, skipping the work that’s supposed to make them better at something. He just stared at me and said, “I read the whole book. I just couldn’t think of a first sentence. I stared at a blank page for 45 minutes. AI just gave me three options, I changed the one I picked anyway.”
We sat down and looked at it together. He was right. The opening line AI gave him was boring, he rewrote it to talk about how the book made him think about his grandpa’s Alzheimer’s, which was something he cared about that AI never would have known. That’s when I started connecting what I saw in that high school classroom to my own kitchen table.
The biggest mistake I see parents and even some teachers make is treating AI like a cheat code that has to be banned entirely, or a magic wand that will fix all our education problems. The middle ground I’ve found after talking to dozens of teachers and students is pretty simple, and it doesn’t require any fancy tech skills or big changes at home.
Instead of asking “did you use AI” when your kid finishes an assignment, ask those three same questions Ms. Henderson asked Mia, out loud: What did AI do for you that you couldn’t do easily yourself? What did you change or rewrite after it gave you a first draft or outline? Can you point to the parts of this that are your ideas? Those questions take 30 seconds, and they force your kid to think through their own process, instead of just hiding that they used a tool.
I do this with my 8th grader now, and I’ve found he uses AI for the same things adults do: he uses it to get past blank page paralysis, to explain a math concept in simpler terms than the textbook uses, to generate practice quiz questions when he’s studying for a test. The only time I make him start over is when he lets AI write the whole thing without changing anything, and that’s happened twice in six months. That’s not that different from when I was a kid and copied a friend’s math homework once, right? It’s a mistake you correct, not a sign of the apocalypse.
Teachers I’ve talked to who handle AI well do one other simple thing: they ask for the whole process, not just the final product. Ms. Henderson has kids turn in their outlines, their rough drafts, their AI edits all together with the final essay. It takes an extra two minutes to check, and it makes it obvious when a kid did the work versus when they just copied and pasted. Parents can do this too, just by asking to see the steps instead of only looking at what they turn in.
A lot of parents I talk to say they’re worried kids won’t learn how to write if they use AI. I heard the same exact argument about calculators when I was in middle school, and then about spell check when I was in high school. The skills we need to teach aren’t the ones that a tool can do faster. They’re the skills AI can’t do: knowing what matters to you, fact-checking the wrong stuff AI makes up, fixing the parts that don’t sound like you, arguing for your point of view.
Mia showed me her essay after class, with the AI outline saved in the document notes. AI got all the basic facts right, but it couldn’t feel the way she felt when her grandma forgot her name, or the smell of the sugar cookies they baked every Christmas. Mia had to put that in there, and she had to rearrange the whole thing to make the story feel right. No AI can do that for her.
I still have moments where I worry. Last month, my son used AI to draft an email to his teacher asking for an extension on a project, and it sounded like a stuffy 40-year-old lawyer wrote it, not a 13-year-old who forgot to work on it over spring break. I made him delete it and write a new one that sounded like him: “Sorry I didn’t finish this, can I have until Friday?” That’s a skill he needs to learn, and AI can’t teach it to him.
We don’t know where this is all going. No one does. I don’t have a neat answer for how it will all work out 10 years from now. But so far, the best approach I’ve found isn’t banning it or embracing it blindly. It’s just asking the questions, checking in, and remembering that the work that matters is still the work the kid has to do themselves. AI is just a tool, same as a calculator, same as a dictionary. The kid is still the one who has to write the story.
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