Is AI a Crutch for Students? A Middle School Math Teacher Breaks Down What Works
Last Tuesday, I was circling my 7th grade classroom during group work on linear slope problems, stepping over a backpack slung in the aisle and dodging the smell of buttered popcorn one kid snuck in for snack, when I noticed Mia slump lower in her chair and slide her phone under her notebook. I leaned over, not mad, just curious, and asked how their group was doing on the intercept practice. She hesitated, then slid the phone back out, thumb hovering over the screen. “I asked it to do last night’s homework,” she mumbled. “I had to watch my little brother until 11 last night, Mom worked a double, and I couldn’t get this no matter how many times I read the textbook. I just needed to get it done.”
I sat down with her and Javi, pulled the notebook toward me. AI had worked out the whole problem step by step, right there on the screen. It even explained why the intercept was negative in that problem, something our textbook glossed over in half a sentence. The only thing Mia had done was copy the final answer onto her homework sheet. She hadn’t even read the explanation.
I didn’t give her a detention or mark her homework zero. I asked her to read the explanation out loud. Halfway through, she stopped and frowned. “Wait, why do we subtract 4 here?” We talked through it for three minutes, right there at the table. By the end, she smiled and did the next two practice problems on her own without help. After class, she came back to my desk and said, “It explains stuff way simpler than the book.”
That night, I got home and helped my own 10th grader with his biology paper. Luka was writing about ocean acidification, and he’d pulled up AI to list the most common myths people repeat about the topic. He said he’d spent two hours Googling and couldn’t get a clear, organized list that wasn’t buried in a 40-page research paper. AI gave him the list in 10 seconds, and he spent the rest of the night building his argument to debunk each one. He ended up getting one of the highest grades in the class, and he told me the AI saved him enough time to actually do the fun part—building the argument—instead of just digging through sources.
That pair of moments got me thinking about all the parent emails I get, all the conference conversations where people ask me if AI is ruining kids, if it’s just a crutch that’s going to make them unable to think for themselves. I get the worry. I’ve seen the kid who turned in a whole book report written entirely by AI, never opened the book, couldn’t tell me a single thing about the main character when I asked. That’s a crutch, no question. But that’s not the tool’s fault, anymore than a calculator is a crutch when a kid uses it to cheat on a times tables test.
What I’ve started doing in my class, and what I tell parents to try at home, is really simple, no big overhauls. First, I don’t ban AI. I just require that every assignment has one line at the top if AI was used: what it was used for. That’s it. No fancy forms, no big process. If a kid writes “AI helped me understand negative intercepts after I got stuck in the book,” that’s fine. If they write “AI wrote my whole book report,” that’s a starting point for a conversation, not an automatic fail.
For parents, the same rule works at home. Instead of sneaking through your kid’s laptop to check if they used AI, or yelling “are you cheating with that thing?” just ask them one question: “What did you use AI for on this assignment?” It’s a non-accusatory question, and it makes them stop and think about their own work. If they can explain what they got from it, and then explain the concept back to you in their own words, it’s a tool, not a crutch. If they can’t, that’s your sign to sit down and work through it together, or ask them to redo the work without just copying the answer.
Another trick I share: if your kid is stuck on a problem and you can’t help them (let’s be real, most of us don’t remember 7th grade slope), suggest they ask AI to explain the concept like they’re 12, then have them teach the concept to you. If they can’t teach it, they don’t get it, and you know you need to help them reach out to the teacher. That’s way more useful than just telling them to figure it out, and it uses AI as a tutor instead of a cheat sheet.
I still deal with kids copying full assignments every month. I still have parents who tell me they’ve banned all AI at their house, and I don’t argue with that—it works for some families. But for most of the kids I see, AI is just what calculators were to my generation, what spell check was to the generation after that: a tool that cuts out the boring, repetitive work so kids can get to the actual thinking.
We don’t have all the rules figured out yet. There’s no neat answer that fits every kid or every assignment. Last week, Mia turned in her homework with that one line at the top: “AI explained the intercepts to me, I did all the problems on my own.” She got all but one right. Right now, that’s good enough for me.
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