Is AI Dependency Changing How Students Tackle Hard Subjects? A Teacher’s Real Take
The late bell had already rung, the cross country team was whooping as they did sprints outside my classroom window, and Javi still slouched in his seat, twisting a sour watermelon candy between his fingers and staring at a crumpled quadratics worksheet. I’d stayed back to help a handful of kids who’d struggled with that week’s quiz, and when everyone else left, he’d raised his hand slow, like he didn’t want to admit he was still stuck. “I used AI to work through this last night,” he said, pulling out his phone, “but I don’t get why it factored out the 2 here. It just says to do it.”
I’ve been teaching 8th grade math for 12 years, so I’ve seen every trick kids use to get through hard homework – copying the back of the book from the kid who got it the year before, texting a friend for answers, leaving half the sheet blank because no one at home remembers what a quadratic even is. For the last two years, every headline I see says AI is creating a generation of dependent kids who can’t solve a hard problem on their own. I went into this school year ready to fight that, banning phones during class, putting extra checks on homework. But what I’ve seen so far isn’t the crisis everyone’s talking about.
A month ago, I did an anonymous check-in with my three classes, just three short questions: Do you use AI for hard homework? How do you use it? Have you gotten better or worse at working through hard subjects since you started using it? Out of 72 kids, only 8 said they use AI to copy all their answers and don’t even try to understand. 47 said they use it after they’ve tried at least three problems on their own and get stuck, when I’m not available and their parents can’t help. The rest use it to check their work, or to get a different explanation than the one I gave in class, because sometimes a different phrasing clicks when mine doesn’t.
Javi’s mom brought this up at parent-teacher conferences last month. She’d seen a viral reel about AI dependency, panicking, checked Javi’s phone history, saw he was using AI for math every night. She sat across from me, twisting her water bottle, saying she was ready to take his phone away entirely during homework time. I asked her if she’d asked Javi how he used it, and she said no, she just got mad. I pulled up his homework from that week – every problem has his own working out, and next to the ones he got stuck on, he’d written little notes: AI said to split the middle term here, still don’t get, ask Ms. Lee. That’s when I showed her: 10 years ago, Javi would’ve just left those problems blank. He’d have shown up to class with half a homework done, been too embarrassed to admit he was stuck, fallen further behind every week. Back then, I’d have marked it wrong, moved on, and Javi would’ve decided he was just bad at math.
That’s the part no one talks about when they yell about AI dependency. The old way of doing things left a lot of kids behind. Kids whose parents work two jobs, don’t have time to help with homework, don’t remember high school algebra. Kids who are too shy to raise their hand in class because they don’t want to be the kid who “doesn’t get it.” AI didn’t create dependency – it just made it easier for kids to get help when they need it, instead of giving up. Is there real dependency? Yeah, I see it. I have a student this year who can’t start a research paper outline without AI, who copies every thesis statement and can’t explain it back to me. But that’s the exception, not the rule. Most of the panic is overstating the problem, because we’re comparing what kids do now to some mythical past where every kid sat down and worked through every hard problem entirely on their own, no help. That never existed. Kids have always gotten help from other people – AI is just a new, more accessible person to ask.
When parents ask me what they should do at home, I don’t tell them to ban AI or take phones away. I give them one low-effort, concrete thing to try: when your kid is working on a hard subject, and you know they’re using AI, ask them to explain one step of the problem or one core idea from their assignment to you, in their own words. That takes two minutes. If they can do it, they’re not dependent – they’re using it as a tool. If they can’t, that’s your cue to sit down with them and say, “Okay, let’s go back and try to work through one part of this together before you use AI to get the answer.” For other teachers, I tell them to stop banning AI, and instead make the explanation part of the grade. I now assign homework where 50% of the credit is for showing your work or explaining your reasoning, even if you used AI to get unstuck. If you use AI, you just add one sentence that says what you learned from it, that’s it. It doesn’t add extra grading work, it just makes kids pause and think about what they’re doing.
Last week, Javi got his quiz back. He scored a B, the first passing grade he’s gotten on a math quiz all year. He came up to my desk after class, crumpled candy wrapper in his hand, grinning, and said he used AI to work through three extra practice problems the night before, after he got stuck on each one. I still have to check in with kids who overuse it. I still have parents come to me worried that their kid is going to forget how to do math on their own. We don’t know what the long-term effects will be, honestly. It’s still new, and we’re all figuring it out as we go. But the change I’ve seen isn’t that kids are more dependent on doing hard things. It’s that fewer kids walk away from a hard subject before they even give it a real try. That’s not the crisis the headlines talk about, but it’s the reality I see every single day.
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