Is AI Helping Kids Learn Or Just Helping Them Avoid Hard Work? A Teacher’s Perspective
Last Wednesday, I stayed after school to grade papers, and 7th grader Javi lingered by my desk, twisting the frayed edge of his backpack strap, waiting to ask something. He was working on our end-of-unit personal narrative, the one where kids write about a time they learned something new about themselves, and he’d been stuck for three days. When I pulled his Chromebook around to see what he had, the first paragraph was polished, lyrical, way more sophisticated than any 12-year-old’s first draft I’d ever read. “I used ChatGPT to get it started,” he mumbled. “I couldn’t think of how to open, and it sounded so much better than anything I could write. Is that cheating?”
I sat down next to him and asked him to just tell me about that day, the day he taught his little sister to ride a bike. He shrugged and started talking: it was 102 degrees, he was supposed to go to the skate park with his friends, his mom made him stay home because his dad was working late. Lila, his sister, fell in the first two minutes, scraped her knee so bad it bleed through her neon socks, and she refused to get back on. He sat on the curb with her for 15 minutes, sharing a cherry popsicle he found in the cooler, trying to talk her into trying again. When she finally rode all the way down the driveway by herself, he screamed so loud the neighbor came outside to see if someone was hurt. That whole messy, warm story came pouring out, way more interesting than the generic AI opening. I said, “That’s the story. Why don’t you write that down, mess and all?”
That same weekend, I caught my own 10-year-old son using Photomath to solve all his multi-step algebra homework at the kitchen table. I’d been grumbling about unapproved AI use for months, so I felt that hot flush of anger rise up before I even thought. “What are you doing?” He just shrugged and said, “I got stuck on the second step last night, and I don’t have time to figure it out before soccer practice. The app shows the steps anyway. Why does it matter if I do it myself?”
That question stuck with me, the same one every parent and teacher is asking right now: is AI helping kids learn, or is it just letting them skip the hard stuff? I hear other teachers talking about banning it from classrooms, I see parents panicking that their kids will get through high school without learning how to write a paragraph or do long division. I get that fear. I’ve had kids turn in whole essays written by AI that they didn’t even bother to change to match their voice. That’s a problem. But what I’ve noticed in the last year, since we started letting kids use AI-enabled tools in class, is that the problem isn’t AI itself. It’s that we haven’t been clear with kids about what the hard stuff actually is, and what it’s okay to offload.
The hard stuff isn’t formatting MLA citations, or getting a perfect opening sentence, or fixing every comma splice. The hard stuff is sitting with the discomfort of being stuck. It’s figuring out what you actually think about a topic, when nothing makes sense at first. It’s working through the mistake you made on a math problem, and figuring out where you went wrong, instead of giving up. That’s the stuff that sticks, that builds the ability to solve harder problems later. AI can’t do that for you, and if you let AI do it for you, you miss the whole point of the assignment.
But that doesn’t mean AI can’t help. After Javi wrote his whole narrative from scratch, he used AI to check his spelling and fix the run-on sentences he always writes. That saved him 10 minutes of poring over his paper looking for mistakes, time he spent adding the line about the neighbor coming outside with a garden hose to cool Lila off, which ended up being my favorite part of the whole essay. Last month, he used AI to pull all his citations together for his bee research paper, so he could spend more time working on his argument that neighborhood backyard gardens help bee populations more than large corporate conservation programs. That was the hard thinking part, and he did all of that himself.
So what do we actually do, as parents and teachers, that doesn’t involve panicking or hiding from AI? I’ve landed on three small, concrete rules that I use in my classroom and at home with my son, and they’ve worked better than any full ban I’ve tried. First, you have to tell me when you use AI, no hiding. No penalties for being honest, just a conversation. Second, you can only use AI for the boring parts, not the thinking parts. I let kids use it for citations, grammar checks, getting topic ideas when you’re staring at a blank page, or explaining a confusing math concept in a different voice than mine. You can’t use it to write the whole essay, solve all your homework problems, or do the brainstorming for you. Third, if you do use it, you have to show me what you did. At home, that means if my son uses Photomath to check a problem, he has to re-write every step in his own words and explain it to me out loud before he’s done. If he can’t explain it, we sit down and do one together, no yelling, no big fight.
When kids ask me if it’s cheating, I tell them it’s like using a calculator. When you’re first learning how to do multiplication, you can’t use a calculator, because you need to learn how to work through it yourself. Once you know how, a calculator just saves you time so you can work on harder problems. AI is the same thing.
Last night I was finishing up grading Javi’s narrative, and he wrote a little note at the bottom: “I almost let AI write the whole thing because I thought my story was too boring and messy. But it’s my messy story, so it’s okay.” I still don’t have all the answers. Some weeks I still catch kids turning in full AI essays, and I still have to pause and remind myself that this is new for all of us, not just them. We’re not going to get it right every time. Right now, what works is being clear about what matters, and what’s just busy work. AI can take care of the busy work. The hard, important stuff? Kids still have to do that themselves.
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