Is AI a crutch for students? What one middle school teacher noticed in her classroom
Last Tuesday, I was walking between rows of desks during 7th grade math independent work, stepping over a stray backpack and the crumpled granola bar wrapper someone left by the door, when I noticed Mia quickly click over from ChatGPT to her Google Classroom assignment. I slowed down and leaned against the edge of her desk, and she sighed and clicked back. The slope problem she was supposed to work through had a full, perfectly formatted step-by-step answer typed out, and her own notebook had nothing more than the problem number written at the top.
“What do you do when you don’t follow step two?” I asked her.
“I just ask it to explain it slower,” she said, shrugging. “If that doesn’t work, I ask it for a simpler example.”
I nodded, then asked the question I’ve been asking kids a lot lately: “If you were up here for the quiz tomorrow, could you work this problem out on a blank piece of paper by yourself?” She shrugged again, that half-embarrassed, half-defiant shrug 12-year-olds do so well, and said, “Probably not. But why do I have to when it can do it for me?”
I texted her mom that night after school, when we both waited by the pickup line for the soccer team bus to pull in. Her mom rolled her eyes and told me Mia has been using AI for all her homework since the start of the semester. She’s behind on her community service hours for the team, so she rushes through work to make practice on time, and AI cuts her homework time from an hour and a half to 15 minutes. Her mom is terrified Mia is going to fail the end-of-year test and have to go to summer school, but she also doesn’t know what to do: take away soccer, or let AI do the work?
That question got me thinking, because I’ve seen both sides of this in three years of having AI in my classroom. A month before Mia, I had Javi, a student with ADHD who’d turned in nothing but blank outlines for his first two history papers of the year, turn in a solid 3-page paper on the Great Depression. He told me he used AI to pull together a basic outline from the sources I assigned, because he can never get past the blank first page. Then he swapped out half of AI’s points for his own observations from the primary source activity we did at the city museum, and added a paragraph about his great-grandma who grew up during the Dust Bowl. He got a B+ on the paper, and it was the first time he’d turned in anything on time all year. For Javi, AI wasn’t a crutch—it was a ramp up to work he never would have done on his own.
It’s easy to fall into one camp or the other: AI is ruining education, or AI is the future of learning. But from what I’ve seen, it’s never that black and white. The difference between a crutch and a tool isn’t the AI itself—it’s whether the kid is using it to skip the work, or using it to help them do the work. And the good news is, you don’t have to be a tech expert to help kids figure that line out.
I’ve started telling parents to try one small shift instead of jumping to ban AI at home. Instead of checking that their kid’s homework is all correct before they turn it in, ask them to spend two minutes at the end of homework time explaining one thing they got from the assignment, if they used AI. If they used it to brainstorm a book report, ask which idea AI gave them they kept, which one they threw out, and why. If they used it to check math problems, ask which one they got wrong and what they learned from AI’s correction. It’s low effort, and it forces kids to process the work instead of just copying it down.
Another small thing I suggest: if your kid is in middle school or older, sit down with them once a month and ask them to show you how they use AI. You can even test it out together on something silly or practical, like planning a weekend hike or brainstorming birthday gift ideas for grandma. Banning AI outright just pushes kids to hide it from you, and you lose any chance to guide their use.
In my own classroom, I changed my homework rules last semester. I don’t collect only finished problems anymore—I collect short work logs, where kids just have to write down what they got stuck on, if they used AI to get unstuck, and what they learned from it. I don’t take points off for using AI—only for not writing down what confused them. It got kids to stop hiding their AI use, so we can actually talk about how to use it well.
Mia tried this shift after our chat. She started doing all the problems on her own first, then using AI to check her answers and walk her through the ones she messed up. Her last quiz grade was 15 points higher than the one before, and she still makes it to all her soccer practices. She still slips up sometimes, though: last week she told me she used AI to do all her problems when she got home at 8pm from an away game and could barely keep her eyes open. I didn’t give her a detention or call her mom. I just reminded her to write it in her log, and we did an extra practice problem together before class the next day.
People have been panicking about new learning tools for as long as I’ve been in education. When I was in middle school, adults said calculators would make us forget how to do long division. When Google first came out, they said it would make us forget how to memorize anything. Those fears never really panned out, because we adjusted how we taught to work with the new tool, instead of just banning it.
Last week I stopped by the bleachers after school where Mia was doing homework before practice. She showed me her notebook, and there was a problem she’d messed up, circled in pink pen, with a note she wrote next to it: “Forgot to divide y change by x change—check AI next time.” It’s not a perfect system, and we’re all still figuring it out. Some kids will use it as a crutch some days, and some will use it as a tool every day. But so far, meeting it head on and teaching kids how to use it intentionally is working way better than pretending it doesn’t exist ever could.
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