Is AI doing to student writing what calculators did to mental math? What parents and teachers should know
Last Tuesday, I stayed after school grading 8th grade argumentative essays, my desk littered with half a peanut butter granola bar, a leaky pen that had stained my blue lesson planner, and a half-cold oat milk latte I’d spilled the minute I sat down. I flipped through the stack, half paying attention, until I hit Milo Carter’s essay. Milo is the kid who usually turns in two paragraphs, covered in skateboard doodles, with half his words misspelled because he rushes to turn it in two minutes before the bell. This essay was five full paragraphs, perfectly structured, with a clear counterargument about how too much recess cuts into learning time, and a neat closing line that tied it all back to student mental health. It was too good. I marked my note and called him over after homeroom the next day.
I leaned against my desk, pushed a stack of poetry packets out of the way, and said, “This line about 15 minutes of recess reducing in-class distraction by 23%—where’d you get that number, Milo?” He shuffled his sneakers against the tile, stared at his scuffed laces, and mumbled that he’d asked AI to write a draft for him, just changed a couple words to make it sound like him. I didn’t panic, didn’t give him a zero, just nodded and asked him what he actually thought about recess. He immediately perked up, started talking about how after lunch he’s so bouncing off the walls he can’t even remember what the math homework is, how the kid who sits next to him gets in trouble every day just because he needs to move. That was his real argument, and it was way clearer when he was talking than the generic AI essay he turned in.
Standing there talking to him, I immediately thought of my dad, who taught high school math for 32 years in the same district I work in now. Back in the early 90s, when the school board voted to allow calculators on state tests, he ranted about it at every dinner. Said kids would never learn to add a tip, never balance a checkbook, never be able to do basic math in their head because they’d just rely on a machine. It was the exact same line I hear parents and even other teachers saying now about AI and writing: kids will never learn to write if they let a machine do it for them.
A couple years before dad retired, he changed his mind. He told me he’d started noticing that the kids who used calculators didn’t skip all the math thinking—they just skipped the tedious part of adding up 10 numbers over and over. That freed them up to actually work through what the word problem was asking, to test different solutions, to understand why the answer mattered. The problem wasn’t the calculator. It was when teachers let kids skip practicing the basic skill of estimating an answer before they hit the equal button. If you can’t guess that 12 times 18 is around 200, you won’t notice when your calculator gives you 2160 instead of 216, right? You just take the wrong answer and move on.
That’s exactly the parallel with AI. The problem isn’t that kids use AI to help with writing. It’s that they skip the messy, hard part of figuring out what they actually want to say, of putting disjointed thoughts into sentences, of crossing out what doesn’t work and trying again. If you never practice that part, you can’t spot when AI wrote a great sounding paragraph that doesn’t actually say what you think, or that the argument it makes doesn’t hold up.
I’ve changed how I assign essays over the past year, after having a handful of these conversations with kids like Milo. Instead of only collecting the final polished essay, I require every step of the process turned in with it: a handwritten brainstorm of three things you actually think about the topic, a rough outline, a first draft with cross-outs and scribbled notes in the margins. It takes an extra 5 minutes to grade, but it means kids can’t just turn in an AI essay and call it done. I also let kids use AI, as long as they tell me what they used it for. If you use it to come up with three topic ideas when you’re stuck staring at a blank screen, that’s great. If you use it to fix your 10 run-on sentences, that’s fine, same as using a dictionary or asking me for help editing. If you use it to write the whole thing, that means you skipped the part you need to practice, so you redo that core part.
For parents who are worried at home, it’s even simpler. Next time your kid is working on a writing assignment, don’t just ask to see the final paper when they’re done. Pull up a chair for two minutes before they start typing, and ask them to tell you what they’re going to write about. If they can’t explain their main point in plain English to you, they don’t actually own that idea yet, same as they can’t check a calculator’s answer if they can’t do the rough mental math first. If they do use AI to help, ask them what parts they changed, and why those changes fit what they wanted to say better. That’s not calling them out for cheating—that’s making sure they’re still the one doing the thinking.
That night after my conversation with Milo, I stood under the school awning waiting for a light rain to slow down so I could get to my car, and I texted my dad the question I’d been thinking about: Do you still think calculators ruined mental math? He texted back two minutes later: Nah. Most kids I know can still figure out a 20% tip. The ones that didn’t want to learn always found a way to skip it anyway.
Last week, I had a parent teacher conference with Milo’s mom, and she asked me the same question everyone asks: Is AI going to ruin his writing? I told her what I think: We don’t have to ban calculators to teach kids math, and we don’t have to ban AI to teach kids how to write. We just have to make sure kids are still practicing the part that matters: the thinking. We’ll see how it goes. There’s still a lot I don’t know. But it’s hard to argue with what dad said, and what I’m seeing in my classroom now: the tool isn’t the problem. It’s what you make kids do before they use it.
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