What Happens When You Remove AI Access Midsemester: A High School Teacher’s Real Observations
It’s 4:30 pm in my 10th grade English classroom, my third coffee of the day is cold, and I’m staring at a stack of 28 rough draft personal essays. Twelve of them open with the exact same line: “The most important lesson I ever learned came from someone I never expected to teach me anything.” Eleven of those end with “This experience taught me that imperfection is what makes life beautiful.” When I called on Jake to talk about his essay about his grandma’s garden the next day, he shrugged and said, “That’s what the AI gave me when I typed in ‘short story about grandma and gardening lesson.’ I don’t really care that much about gardening, honestly.”
I’d started the semester with a relaxed approach. I told students AI is a tool, just like Google or spell check, use it however you want as long as you turn in work that reflects what you actually think. But by mid-October, I’d noticed the flatness creeping in. No one brought messy, half-baked ideas to class anymore. Discussion stayed surface-level, full of generic answers that sounded copied from a study guide. After Jake’s comment, I made the call: starting that week, no AI use for any in-class work, and no AI allowed on any out-of-class drafts or assignments for the rest of the semester. I blocked the main AI sites on our classroom Chromebooks, and sent a note home to parents explaining what we were doing, in case they wanted to help enforce the rule for at-home work.
The first two weeks were rough. Kids complained nonstop. Mia, who’d turned in perfectly polished first drafts all semester, turned in a half-finished draft with three cross-outs per paragraph and a note scrawled on the bottom: “This is garbage. I don’t know how to do this without it.” Grades on the first two minor assignments dropped an average of 7 points. I started second-guessing myself—was this just an outdated move, ruining kids’ grades for no reason other than my own discomfort with new technology?
Three weeks in, we did midterm review for To Kill a Mockingbird. I asked the usual opening question: What’s the main thing to take away about Atticus Finch? Before, every hand that went up gave the same answer: Atticus is a moral hero who teaches us to stand up for what’s right. That day, there was a 10-second pause, then Lila, who almost never talks in class, raised her hand and said, “What if he’s just tired? Like, he knew Tom Robinson was going to lose before he even started, right? He doesn’t want to let his kids down, but he doesn’t even believe in the fight anymore, either.”
Half a dozen other kids jumped in right after that. They brought up small lines they’d noticed, offhand comments Atticus makes to his kids that never get mentioned in the study guides. No one pulled out a generic pre-written answer. That’s when I noticed the first real shift: kids were talking about the material like it was something they got to think about, not something they had to recite back to me.
After another two weeks, I started seeing changes in writing too. Kids weren’t turning in perfectly polished first drafts anymore, but they were turning in drafts that had actual personality. Jake rewrote his grandma essay for the final submission. He wrote about how he hated helping her in the garden every weekend, he’d rather be inside playing video games, but after she got diagnosed with lung cancer, he realized she just wanted someone to sit outside with her while she dug weeds. It wasn’t perfectly structured, it had half a dozen run-on sentences, and he never mentioned any big “lesson” about imperfection. When he turned it in, he said, “I didn’t want any AI messing with this. It’s my story.”
From this experiment, I’ve picked up a few concrete things that other teachers or parents can use if they’re thinking of pulling back on AI use. First, don’t just ban it cold turkey and leave kids hanging. AI fills specific gaps for them—brainstorming when they’re stuck, getting that first sentence down. I replaced that with small, low-prep tools that work just as well. For kids stuck on brainstorming, we do 5-minute unfiltered brain dumps: write every random thought you have about the topic, no judging, no fixing spelling. It takes 5 minutes, no extra work, and it almost always pulls out an idea that’s actually theirs. For kids who can’t write that first introduction, I give them a simple two-line fill-in: “I’m writing this because I want you to know ____. The thing that surprised me most about this was ____.” For parents, if you suspect your kid is relying on AI for all their homework, you don’t have to sneak through their laptop to catch them. Just try a one-week trial, work through the 5-minute brain dump with them before they start writing, and keep AI turned off for that week to see what comes out.
It’s not a perfect fix. Even now, at the end of the semester, three or four kids still admit they use AI when they’re cramming homework the night before a deadline. Average grades stayed lower for almost six weeks while kids unlearned the habit of letting AI do the thinking for them. But reading quiz scores, which test how well kids actually understand what they read, are up 11% from the first half of the semester. The average final essay score is actually 3 points higher than the first essay average, because the ideas are stronger, even if the writing is messier.
I don’t think AI is bad, and next semester I’ll still let kids use it for editing grammar, or for brainstorming if they’re really stuck. But I didn’t expect how much space removing it midsemester would clear up for kids to actually think. Half the time now, when I ask a question, there’s a long pause before anyone answers. That used to make me uncomfortable. Now I know that pause just means they’re working it out in their own heads, not pulling up a pre-written answer. There’s still a lot to figure out, and some kids are still struggling to re-learn how to work through the messy parts of writing and thinking on their own. But for the first time this semester, when I walk around the classroom while kids work, I hear them talking to each other about their ideas, not about what prompt they fed the AI that morning. That’s a difference I can’t unsee.
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