What I Learned About AI in Education As a Journalist and Parent
Last month I sat in the back of my son Jake’s 10th grade English class, notebook open, half listening to the To Kill a Mockingbird discussion and half refreshing my email for a source’s response. When Ms. Henderson, the teacher, called on Jake, I tensed up. He’d forgotten to study for a quiz the week before, and I half expected him to mumble that he hadn’t read. Instead, he pulled up a 3-bullet outline on his Chromebook and talked through how Atticus’s quiet refusal to yell made his decision to take the case feel heavier than any big, dramatic speech could. After class, I mentioned how impressed I was that he’d put that together so quickly. Ms. Henderson, her worn copy of the novel dotted with coffee stains, smiled and said the outline was AI-generated. “He did all the thinking after that,” she said. “That’s the part that matters.”
I’ve spent the last six months covering AI in education for a local education outlet, so I’ve heard every possible take. Parents I talk to are mostly convinced AI is turning every kid into a cheater who can’t write a sentence on their own. Ed tech vendors say AI will solve teacher shortages and cut homework time in half. Before that classroom visit, I leaned closer to the parent panic. Two weeks earlier, I’d found a full two-page response to a New Deal history question open on Jake’s laptop, and I’d immediately called him downstairs, ready to ground him for a month for cheating. He leaned against the kitchen counter, sighed, and walked me through it: he’d been stuck for an hour trying to come up with three solid arguments for how the New Deal still affects us today, so he asked ChatGPT for a starting list. Then he cut two of the three generic arguments, added his own point about his great-grandma getting a job with the WPA that he’d learned about at a family reunion last summer, and rewrote every line to match the way he talks. “It’s like when you help me brainstorm a paper before I write it,” he said. “You just don’t get annoyed when I ask you to start over three times.” I pulled up the original AI output to check, and he was right. The AI’s version was generic, boring, and didn’t mention anything we’d talked about as a family.
I’ve talked to 14 teachers, principals, and school board members across the state in the last six months, and that story comes up over and over. The panic about AI is mostly about what we imagine is happening, not what’s actually happening in most classrooms. Don’t get me wrong, there are real problems. I talked to a 7th grade language arts teacher in Dayton who had three kids turn in full AI-generated essays last semester that didn’t even answer the question she’d asked—they just copied and pasted whatever the AI spit out. She spent three extra hours after school tracking it down and talking to parents, and she’s still exhausted from updating all her lesson plans to account for AI on top of everything else she already does. What’s interesting is that none of the teachers I talked to wanted a full ban. Most said they’d already changed their assignments instead of fighting the tool. Instead of 5-page take-home essays that can be generated in 2 minutes, they do more in-class writing workshops, more oral presentations, more projects that require kids to connect the work to their own lives—things AI can’t fake.
After all these interviews and my own time as a parent figuring this out, the small, low-effort shifts are what work, not big overhauls or blanket bans. The first thing I started doing is swapping the accusation “Did you use AI to do this?” for the question “What did AI help you do here, and what did you add on your own?” It doesn’t put kids on the defensive right away, and it gets them talking about their process instead of hiding what they did. The second thing that comes up over and over from teachers is the “halfway rule.” If your kid uses AI to brainstorm ideas or make an outline, they have to close the AI tool before they start writing the actual assignment. If they use AI to make a study guide, they have to turn it off before they start quizzing themselves. It keeps AI a starting point, not a replacement for their own work. For younger kids working through math homework, many teachers I spoke with said it’s fine to let AI check answers, as long as the kid works through every problem first, then uses AI to see where they messed up. The third thing is just a 5-minute check: pull up your school’s parent portal or send a quick email to your kid’s teacher to ask what their policy on AI use is. A lot of parents I talk to assume all AI use is cheating, but most schools have updated their policies in the last year to allow it as a study or brainstorming tool, same as a tutor or a textbook.
When I was in middle school, teachers banned calculators from math class because they were convinced kids would never learn how to add and subtract on their own. Now every kid uses a calculator, and we just teach them how to use it right. AI feels a lot like that right now. The hype is loud on both sides, but what’s actually happening is that kids and teachers are just figuring it out as they go.
Last week, Jake studied for his biology midterm using AI. He asked it to generate a practice quiz that only covered the topics his teacher had listed on the study guide, instead of the random mix of questions in the textbook. It cut his study time by almost an hour, so he got to finish his studying, go to soccer practice, and be in bed by 10 instead of staying up cramming. He got a B+ on the test, which is pretty typical for him. I still don’t know if this is all going to work out the way we want it to. There are still going to be kids who cut corners, there are still going to be teachers who don’t have the time or support to update their lessons. I still check in every couple of weeks, I still ask that question about what he added that AI didn’t. So far, that’s enough. It’s messy, it’s still changing, and no one has all the answers. That’s just where we are right now.
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