Is AI doing to student writing what calculators did to mental math? What parents need to know
Last Wednesday, I was grading 7th grade personal narratives at my desk after school, sipping coffee that had gone cold an hour earlier, when I got to Javi’s essay. Javi’s the kid who turns in half-scrawled assignments on notebook paper torn out of his math notebook, usually with a doodle of a skateboard in the margin. His prompt was to write about a time you learned something about persistence, so I expected the usual: three short paragraphs, a couple misspelled words, the core of a good story buried under messy handwriting. This essay was different. It was perfectly formatted, no grammar errors, every sentence flowed smoothly. It talked about breaking his ankle at the skate park last summer, and how it changed his approach to practicing tricks. But it didn’t sound like Javi.
When I pulled him aside the next day before homeroom, he twisted his skateboard keychain around his finger for a full minute before admitting he’d typed his three bullet point notes into AI and asked it to “make it sound good for school.” “I know what I want to say,” he mumbled, “I just don’t know how to say it right.” That’s when the question I’d been turning over for months clicked into place: this is exactly what people said about calculators and mental math 40 years ago, isn’t it?
I remembered my own 10th grade math teacher, Mr. Hale, slamming my TI-81 down on his desk and warning me that I’d never be able to add two numbers in my head if I kept relying on that thing. Back then, the panic was that tools would make kids lose the core skill they needed. Now the panic is that AI will make kids lose the ability to write their own thoughts. But what actually happened with calculators? I still can’t do long division quickly in my head if I’m trying to split a dinner check with three friends. I pull out my phone calculator and do it. That doesn’t mean I don’t understand math. When calculators became standard, good teachers stopped wasting time drilling 100 multiplication problems a night and started focusing on what actually matters: can you set up the right problem to solve? Can you tell if your answer makes sense? That’s the shift we need to make with writing and AI, too.
I sat with Javi that morning after homeroom and pulled up his original bullet points: “Fell wrong trying a 3 stair. Heard a crack. Thought I’d never skate again. Dad carried me to the car. Cried the whole way because I missed the competition. Physical therapy sucked. Now I warm up way more, I don’t rush tricks. I’m better now.” That’s all Javi. I asked him to tell me the story out loud, just like he’d tell it to his best friend at lunch. He talked for five minutes, about how the concrete was still cold from the morning rain, how his dad’s back hurt for three days after carrying him because he’s getting bigger now, how he wanted to quit after the first month of therapy but his coach made him just stand on the board for five minutes a day. When he was done, I pulled up the AI essay and read a line: “This devastating injury taught me the value of patience and hard work.” Javi laughed. “That’s so weird. I would never say that.” I said, exactly. The work that matters in writing isn’t turning bullet points into fancy sentences. The work that matters is having the idea, living the experience, figuring out what you want to say. AI can do the boring polishing, just like a calculator can do the boring adding. But it can’t tell your story.
That’s the thing I try to tell parents who email me panicking that their kid is using AI for all their homework. You don’t have to sneak around their laptop to check, and you don’t have to ban AI entirely. There are three small things you can do that take almost no extra time. First, when your kid sits down to write any assignment, ask them to tell you what they’re going to write about out loud before they open their laptop. If they can explain their main points, their story, their argument to you in their own words, they’ve done the core work. If they can’t, that’s when you talk through it together, before any AI gets involved. Second, if they do use AI to fix grammar or organize messy notes, tell them to go through every paragraph after and change any sentence that doesn’t sound like them. I tell my students AI can be your spell check and your second pair of eyes, not your writer. Third, stop worrying about every little grammar error in their homework. When I was growing up, a huge part of writing grades was fixing commas and spelling. Now AI can do that in two seconds, so we can care more about whether the idea is clear and theirs.
It’s not all perfect. I’ve had kids turn in full essays written entirely by AI that they didn’t even read. That’s a problem, just like it’s a problem when kids just type a problem into a calculator and copy the answer without understanding what it means. The risk isn’t the tool itself. The risk is that kids skip the part where they practice thinking and putting their own thoughts into words. That’s the part we can’t let them skip.
Javi ended up rewriting his essay. He kept almost all of his own words, used AI to fix his 17 misspellings and three missing commas, and turned it in. It was still messy, it still had a couple awkward phrases, but it was his. Last week, he volunteered to read it out loud to the class, and when he got to the part where he landed his first ollie after six months of therapy, half the class cheered. I still don’t have all the answers. Some of my colleagues still insist we should ban AI from all writing assignments, just like there were math teachers who refused to let calculators in their classrooms for decades. I get the worry. It’s new, it’s changing how our kids learn, and change feels scary. But so far, shifting what we expect, and what we care about, is working. We’re all still figuring it out, one messy, personal essay at a time.
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