What I Learned About AI in Education As a Journalist and School Parent
I was sitting in the back of a high school auditorium last month, notebook open on my lap, waiting for the school board to take up the new AI policy. I’d spent three weeks reporting on this issue, talking to superintendents, tech CEOs and teachers, but I still carried the same quiet panic most parents do: Is this going to ruin how my kid learns? Halfway through public comment, my phone buzzed. It was my 10th grader, Sam: “Stuck on TKAM essay, can I use that thing to get started?” I typed back “Wait till I pick you up” and slipped my phone back in my bag.
A mom got up next, voice tight, and explained her 8th grader had gotten a zero on a book report after a teacher’s AI detector flagged it as written by a bot. She said the school was punishing kids for using tools that are everywhere now, and she had a point. Another dad followed, saying districts that ban AI are leaving kids unprepared for college and work, where AI is already standard. I’d heard both sides dozens of times in my reporting, and both rang true. No one wants kids to coast through four years of high school without learning how to string together a coherent argument. No one wants kids to graduate without basic skills that every employer will expect them to have.
After the meeting adjourned without a vote – they wanted more input from teachers, which felt about right – I drove to the soccer fields to get Sam. He climbed in, cleats clanking against the car floor, goldfish crumbs stuck to his hoodie, and pulled up his essay draft on his phone. He’d already typed his prompt into the tool: “Give me three different opening lines for an essay arguing Scout loses her innocence gradually, not just after the Tom Robinson trial.” “None of them were any good,” he said, “but one made me think of the part where she still teases Boo Radley after the lynch mob. I rewrote the whole thing.”
I looked at the two versions side by side. The AI’s opening was generic, all “childhood is a time of slow change” fluff. Sam’s version started with “When Scout stood between Atticus and the lynch mob, she thought she was just defusing a fight with friends. She didn’t realize she’d already outgrown part of the innocent kid she used to be, and she’d go right back to teasing Boo Radley a week later.” That was his take, I’d never thought of that angle before. The AI just got him past the blank page he’d been staring at for 45 minutes after practice.
That 2-minute conversation in the car changed how I think about this topic, more than any interview I did for my published story. I used to have a hard no AI rule for all homework, same as a lot of parents I know. Now I have three simple, clear rules we follow at our house, and several teachers I’ve talked to use similar guidelines in their classrooms. First: If you use AI for any part of an assignment, you paste the original AI output at the end of your paper and write one sentence explaining how you changed it to make it yours. You don’t get in trouble for using it, you just can’t hide it. Second: You can only use it to unstick you, not do the work for you. Stuck brainstorming? Stuck figuring out what a calculus term means? Stuck staring at a blank opening paragraph? That’s fine. Use it to get moving. If you use it to write the whole essay or solve all your homework problems, that’s not allowed. Third: If you use AI to study for a test, you have to close the AI and explain the concept out loud to me (or the cat, it doesn’t matter who’s listening) before you’re done. If you can’t explain it in your own words, you don’t actually know it.
When I sat in on a 10th grade biology class a couple of weeks later, the teacher was doing something similar. She had kids use AI to come up with hypotheses for their bean germination experiment, then had them test the hypotheses over a week and write a short paragraph pointing out all the mistakes the AI made. Most kids were surprised to find the AI got the effect of water temperature completely wrong. The teacher told me after class that kids don’t learn how to check for mistakes if everything they turn in is perfect. Before AI, kids just copied wrong answers from their friends. Now they check AI’s wrong answers, which is a more useful skill anyway.
It’s not all smooth, of course. Last week I caught Sam using AI to solve all 20 of his algebra practice problems. He said he got the concept, he just didn’t want to do all the repetitive busy work. We didn’t take away his laptop or give him extra punishment. We compromised: he does 10 problems on his own to practice the skill, checks the other 10 with AI, and marks any he gets wrong to go over with his teacher the next day. He still gets the practice he needs, and the AI cuts out the tedious part he hates.
The school board ended up passing a policy that doesn’t ban AI, just requires all teachers to include lessons on responsible use in their curriculum. That makes sense to me now, even if I still have days where I worry. I grew up with teachers panicking about calculators making kids bad at math, then the internet making kids bad at research. AI is just the next tool that changes how we learn. No one has all the answers yet, and that’s okay. Banning it doesn’t keep kids from using it – it just teaches them to use it in secret, without learning how to use it well. For now, those three simple rules work for us. We’ll adjust as we go.
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