Is AI doing to student writing what calculators did to mental math? A teacher’s take
Last Tuesday night, I was grading 10th grade essays at my kitchen table after dinner, and my 13-year-old son slouched in the chair next to me cramming out pre-algebra homework. A half-eaten granola bar was stuck to his notebook, his hoodie had a chewed hole at the elbow, and he reached for his phone before he even finished writing the equation to check three two-digit multiplications. I huffed, the same automatic huff I’ve heard my own mom use on me when I got my first graphing calculator in high school: “Kids these days can’t do any math in their heads.”
Two minutes later, I opened the next essay and caught myself doing the exact same huff about writing. The sentences were too smooth, the argument too polished, nothing like the messy, tangly writing this student usually turned in. I’d just had the conversation in the teacher’s lounge that morning: AI is ruining student writing. And that’s when the thought clicked: isn’t this exactly what people said about calculators and mental math 30 years ago?
Earlier that month, Mia, a quiet 10th grader, stayed after class to talk about her To Kill a Mockingbird essay. I’d left a note that the opening felt off, not like her work, and I was ready to talk about academic honesty. But she pulled out her crumpled notebook, full of sticky tabs marked in her book, and showed me all her work first. She’d spent two nights jotting down notes: how she thought Atticus was overrated, how he knew the system was racist long before the trial, but he didn’t rock the boat until his own daughter got threatened. All those sharp, personal observations were hers. She just hated writing introductions. Got stuck for hours staring at a blank page, trying to make the first sentence perfect. So she plugged all her bullet points into AI, asked for three opening options, then picked the line she liked from each and rewrote them to sound like her. That’s when I thought: that’s exactly what I do with a calculator when I’m balancing my budget. I do the thinking, I know what number I’m roughly aiming for, I just let the calculator do the tedious arithmetic I don’t want to waste time on.
But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing to worry about. Two weeks ago, my son went to a pizza party with five of his friends, and the restaurant cell service cut out right when they went to split the bill. The total was $48, plus tip. None of them could get within $3 of the correct per-person amount. They guessed between $7 and $15, just throwing numbers out. They never practice mental math, because they always have a calculator, so they lost that basic number sense that lets you check if your answer makes sense. Same thing with writing. If a student lets AI write the whole essay from the first prompt, never practices getting their own messy thoughts down on paper, they never build that sense for what their own voice sounds like, or how to untangle a fuzzy idea into something other people can follow. Last semester, I had a student turn in a whole AI-written essay on social media’s effect on teen mental health, and when I asked him what he thought, he just shrugged and said “I don’t know, that’s what it said.” He didn’t even do the thinking work, because he let the tool do it for him.
I’ve adjusted my class rules the same way most math teachers adjusted theirs decades ago, and it’s worked pretty well so far. First, just like math teachers require you to show your work, I require students to turn in all their pre-writing with their final essays. That means their brainstorm bullet points, their messy first draft with cross-outs, their sticky note notes from the book. It doesn’t matter if they use AI to polish sentences or fix awkward phrasing, as long as I can see the thinking they did before AI got involved. For parents, this is easy to do at home too: instead of only checking your kid’s finished writing assignment, ask to see the messy draft they wrote before they (or AI) cleaned it up. You don’t even have to grade it, just confirm that they did the thinking work themselves.
Second, we do 10 minutes of ungraded, no-device free writing every Friday. It’s the same as the 5 minutes of mental math practice elementary teachers do every morning. It’s just low-stakes practice building the skill of putting ideas into words, no pressure to be perfect. At home, this can be as simple as having your kid write a 10-minute handwritten note to a grandparent once a month, or jot down their opinion on the latest Netflix show they binged, no AI allowed. It’s just practice to keep that skill sharp.
I still catch myself reaching for a calculator to add up three numbers at the grocery store, even when I could do it in my head. I still use AI to clean up the formal emails I write to parents and the school board, because I hate writing formal emails and just want to get my point across. I don’t think AI is going to “ruin” student writing any more than calculators ruined math. But I do think we need to stop panicking about the tool and start teaching kids where the line is: the tool can do the tedious work for you, but it can’t do your thinking for you. That’s the part you have to practice, no shortcuts allowed. We’re still figuring it out, same as teachers did with calculators 30 years ago. But so far, this balance feels right.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » Is AI doing to student writing what calculators did to mental math