Is AI a Crutch for Students? A Middle School Teacher Breaks Down What Actually Works
Last Tuesday, after the bell rang for 3rd period, Mia hung back by my desk, twisting the neon pink friendship bracelet on her wrist, while I flipped through her personal narrative. The edge of the printed page was smudged with pencil eraser, and the essay was about her grandma’s dementia and the tomato garden they planted every spring. It was good – way more cohesive than the jumbled, half-written drafts she usually turned in. I looked up and asked, “Did you get some help with this one?” She didn’t lie. She pulled out her phone and pulled up a chat log, explained she’d written all her ideas down first, but couldn’t stop writing 3-line run-on sentences and couldn’t figure out how to order the stories. So she asked AI to fix the structure, and left the actual story exactly how she wrote it. That same afternoon, I graded Javi’s current events essay on rising sea levels. It was flawless, until I asked him to explain the point about wetland restoration he’d included, and he shrugged and said, “AI wrote it. I needed to get it done before practice.”
I’ve been asking myself this question every day for two years, both as a 7th grade ELA teacher and as a mom of a 10th grader who plays varsity soccer and struggles to keep his homework straight. Last fall, I caught him copying full AI answers for biology homework after he’d stayed late to a game and forgotten the assignment was due. A month later, he was stuck on a calculus problem I couldn’t begin to help him with, and he used AI to walk through each step of the problem, crossing out the steps that didn’t make sense to him and reworking them until he got it right. Same tool, two totally different outcomes.
People love to argue that AI is making kids lazy, that it’s a crutch that’ll ruin their ability to think for themselves. I heard the exact same thing about calculators when I was in high school, and spell check when I started teaching 15 years ago. The problem isn’t the tool – it’s that we’re still expecting kids to use it like it doesn’t exist, instead of teaching them how to use it right.
I changed a few small things in my classroom that have made a big difference, and I do the same things at home with my son. First, I don’t ban AI. I just require everyone to turn in their “work trail” with every assignment. For essays, that means the messy first draft, any notes they jotted down on the bus or during lunch, and if they used AI, a screenshot of the chat marked up with what AI wrote and what they changed. When I talk to parents at conferences, I tell them to do this at home too – it’s not about policing, it’s about making the process visible. It takes two extra minutes, and it immediately separates kids who are using AI to get unstuck from kids who are using it to do the whole assignment for them.
Another thing I do is build AI into assignments on purpose. Last month, instead of asking kids to write a full persuasive essay from scratch, I had them write three core arguments for why their favorite snack should be added to the cafeteria menu. Then I told them to use AI to expand one argument into a full paragraph, then cross out any part of AI’s paragraph that didn’t sound like them, or that they didn’t agree with. Half the kids ended up rewriting the whole paragraph after seeing what AI wrote, and they talked through why AI’s generic point about “healthy snacks for growing bodies” didn’t match what they actually thought (which was that Cheetos just taste better than apple slices). That’s thinking practice, not a crutch.
At home, I have three quick questions I ask my son whenever I see him using AI for homework. It’s become a routine that doesn’t start fights: What part did AI do for you? What did you change that AI wrote? What did you learn from this? Last week, he admitted he’d asked AI to write an outline for his history paper because he was overwhelmed by how much research he had. He changed half the outline, and he told me it helped him stop spinning his wheels and start writing. That’s a tool, not a crutch.
I still get caught off guard sometimes. Last week, I had three kids turn in full AI essays that they didn’t change a word of, and all three were kids who are already stretched too thin – one has a new baby at home that his single mom can’t afford childcare for, one works 20 hours a week at his family’s taco truck to help pay rent, one is struggling with anxiety that makes it hard to get anything done on time. It’s not that AI made them lazy; it’s that they were looking for a way to keep up, and no one showed them another way.
We’re all still figuring this out. I don’t have a one-size-fits-all answer, and there are still days I worry I’m getting it wrong. Mia’s essay ended up winning our school’s young writers contest last month, and when she accepted the award, she talked about how AI helped her get her story out when her own brain was too messy to do it. That’s the part a lot of people miss: for some kids, AI isn’t a crutch. It’s the thing that lets them show what they can actually do, instead of getting stuck on the parts they struggle with. We just have to stop treating it like the enemy and start teaching kids how to use it. That’s all any of us can do right now.
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