What Educators Are Actually Telling Students About Their Future With AI Advancements
Last month, I sat across from my 11th grader’s computer science teacher at fall parent-teacher conferences, a crumpled granola wrapper tucked under the leg of his desk and a student’s half-finished solar-powered phone charger propped on the shelf behind him. My son Leo was leaning against the cinder block wall in the hall, scrolling TikTok while we talked, but earlier that morning he’d pulled me aside and told me to ask Mr. Henderson what he thought about his plan to apply to both computer science and creative writing programs. Leo’s been stuck for months: he says both fields feel like they’ll be overtaken before he graduates, so why bother picking either?
Mr. Henderson laughed when I said that, leaned back in his 18-year-worn desk chair, and said he gets that question at least three times a week from kids, even 9th graders. Most of what you read online is either full panic that all jobs will disappear or overblown hype that AI will make every part of life easier, he said, but what he tells kids is way simpler than that.
Last semester, he had his class use AI to draft a personal narrative, then rewrite it to add the specific, messy details only they knew. One girl wrote about visiting her grandma in a nursing home, and AI’s draft talked about “sad goodbyes and cherished memories” – generic, fine, completely forgettable. The girl rewrote it to add that her grandma always smelled like lemon Pledge even when she couldn’t remember her name, that she still asked about the goldfish the girl had when she was 7, that the nursing home’s vending machine only ever had root beer that was warm. No AI can pull those details out of nowhere, he said. That’s your job, no one else’s.
The first thing he tells students is to stop asking “will AI take my job” and start asking “what can I get AI to do that I don’t want to do?” If you’re a writer, AI can crank out the first draft of a boring client blog post so you can spend time on the novel you’re writing. If you’re a coder, AI can debug the 100 lines of repetitive basic code so you can figure out how to make your app work for people with poor vision. It’s a tool, not a replacement, he says, and the faster kids get comfortable using it for the grunt work, the more time they have for the part that matters.
The second thing he makes every student do is practice one “human-only” skill every semester. It can’t be something vague like “critical thinking” – it has to be something that relies on being a person in the world with specific experiences and the ability to read other people. A kid who wants to be a lawyer might practice mediating a fight between two friends, learning how to listen to both sides and find a compromise no one hates. A kid who wants to be a graphic designer might practice planning a birthday party for 10 people with different dietary restrictions and a $150 budget. AI can give you a sample schedule, but it can’t read the room and know that your cousin is allergic to nuts and also hates being the center of attention so you don’t force her to wear a sash and sing happy birthday first. That’s the skill that will always be in demand, he said, no matter how much better tools get.
The third thing he teaches is to practice questioning AI’s answers. He has a 10-minute weekly exercise where kids pull up an AI response to a question they had, then write three questions that poke holes in it. If AI says the best way to study for a test is spaced repetition, you ask “does this work for people with ADHD who can’t stick to a rigid schedule?” If AI says the best vacation spot for families is Disney World, you ask “does this account for people who can’t afford $200 a day for tickets?” He told me this is something parents can easily do at home too – just ask your kid once a week what AI told them, and what it missed. It takes two minutes at dinner, no prep required.
I drove home that day thinking about all the panic I’d worked up over Leo’s future. I’d read dozens of articles talking about which majors are “safe” and I’d started subtly pushing him toward nursing, because I heard that can’t be automated. But after talking to Mr. Henderson, I stopped that. Instead, I started asking that dinner question he mentioned: once a week, we go around the table and say one thing AI helped us with that week, and one thing it couldn’t do. Last week, my 14-year-old daughter said AI helped her finish her history outline, but it couldn’t help her practice her volleyball serve or cheer her up when her best friend bailed on their plans.
A few days ago, Leo showed me a draft of the personal statement he’s working on for college. He used AI to get a rough outline, then he deleted almost all of it, because it didn’t have the part about when we fostered a rescue dog last year that ran away, and he sat on the side of the road for three hours in the rain waiting for it to come back. AI couldn’t write that cold rain seeping through his hoodie, or the way his hands shook when we finally found the dog stuck under a neighbor’s porch, he said. That’s just his.
I still don’t know what Leo’s future will look like. No one does, right? There’s still a lot that’s uncertain about how technology will change work and school in the next 10 years. But the advice educators are giving kids isn’t the fear-mongering I see on my social media feed. It’s small, steady stuff: use the tool, don’t fight it, and hold tight to the parts of you that can’t be coded or replicated. It’s not a perfect, neat plan, but it’s a lot more manageable than panicking about a future no one can really predict.
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