What I Learned When My Kid’s School Started Promoting AI Use in Class
My sneakers stuck to a sticky patch of spilled fruit punch on the middle school auditorium floor as the principal wrapped up her back-to-school address last month. She saved the new initiative for last: this year, all our teachers are being trained to encourage responsible AI use for classwork, and students are welcome to use AI tools on most assignments, as long as they disclose how they used them. The mom sitting next to me, whose daughter is in the same 8th grade class as my son Sam, leaned over and mouthed, “Are they serious?” I nodded, my chest tightening a little. I’d come into the night worried about bus routes and lunch prices, not my kid’s school actively promoting something I’d only ever read about as a cheating scandal waiting to happen.
I cornered Sam’s social studies teacher, Ms. Lopez, after the presentation, while we all grabbed lukewarm chocolate chip cookies from a folding table by the door. I asked her straight out: aren’t you just teaching kids to let AI do their work for them? She wiped a crumb off her lanyard and said, “Last year, I failed three kids for turning in AI-generated essays I didn’t catch. Another 10 turned in work that was half AI, half theirs, and I had no way to grade them fairly. This year, I don’t pretend AI doesn’t exist. I teach them how to use it so I can actually see what they know.”
That night, Sam was working on his presentation about the New Deal at the kitchen table, while I folded a load of his soccer practice laundry. I walked by to grab a dish towel, and saw ChatGPT open on his laptop. I stopped, and before I could even form a question, he turned the screen toward me. “I couldn’t get the difference between AAA and WPA to sound simple enough for the class, so I asked it to explain it three ways. The third one makes sense, so I’m rewriting it in my own words for my talk.” He scrolled down, and I saw he’d crossed out whole sections of the AI output, scribbled notes in the margins, crossed out the AI’s formal jargon and wrote “farmers got paid to not grow crops so food prices went up” instead.
A week later, he had an English assignment: a personal narrative about a challenge. He sat staring at a blank Google doc for 10 minutes, complaining he couldn’t figure out how to start. He pulled up AI, typed “write a 3-paragraph rough draft about a teenager who failed at a long bike trip he trained for,” got a generic draft, then deleted half of it, added the part where he forgot his water bottle and had to walk 3 miles in the rain, and changed the cliché ending from “I learned never to give up” to “I learned I hate long bike trips, and that’s okay.” He ended up getting an A, and Ms. Henderson wrote on the paper “great voice—love that you made this yours.”
I’ve talked to a lot of parents since that night, and most of them are as nervous as I was initially. We all grew up with the rule that any outside help on an assignment is cheating, and that’s a hard habit to unlearn. But what I’ve started to realize is that the school isn’t promoting cheating—they’re promoting a different way of learning, one that meets kids where they are. AI is a tool, like calculators were when we were kids, or Google before that. Everyone panicked when calculators got put into math class, saying kids would never learn to add. Now we don’t think twice about it.
I’ve changed a few small things at home that have worked so far, that other parents can try if they’re feeling this same uncertainty. First, I swapped the question “Did you use AI on this?” for “What did you use AI for on this?” Asking if they used it puts them on the defensive right away. Asking what they used it for starts a conversation. I don’t get mad if they used it to get past writer’s block or check a math step. I only push back if they used it to do the whole assignment. Second, we have a hard rule for any assignment that uses AI: they have to add a 2-sentence “AI use note” at the top, that says what AI did, and what they changed or added. Sam forgets sometimes, but when he does, he gets a reminder, and it makes him think through what he’s actually contributed. Third, once a week, I ask him to show me one way he used AI that week. It takes 3 minutes, and I’ve learned as much as he has. Last week he showed me how he uses it to translate Spanish homework phrases when he gets stuck, instead of skipping the whole problem. It’s not cheating, it’s a crutch that lets him keep going instead of getting stuck and giving up.
It’s not all smooth, of course. Two weeks ago, Sam turned in a study guide for a science test that he just had AI generate, word for word, no edits. His teacher took points off, made him redo it, and sent me a quick email. We sat down after that, and talked about how that’s what happens when you use AI to skip the work of studying. The consequence was his, and that was the lesson, way better than any lecture I could have given. Some teachers at the school are still figuring it out too—one of Sam’s teachers bans AI entirely, which is fine, and another lets kids use it on everything as long as they disclose it. There’s no consistent rule right now, which is frustrating some days.
I still have questions. I wonder if 10 years from now, kids will struggle to write a full essay without AI’s help. I wonder if the school is moving too fast, without enough training for teachers or parents. But I also know that when I was Sam’s age, I spent hours staring at blank pages, too stuck to start, turning in work that was nowhere near what I was actually capable of. Sam doesn’t do that anymore. He starts faster, he gets unstuck faster, and the work he turns in is more his than the work I turned in at that age, most days. We’re all still figuring this out, school and parents and kids alike. It’s messy, and it’s new, but it doesn’t have to be the disaster I thought it would be when I was standing in that auditorium, stuck to the fruit punch floor.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » What I Learned When My Kid’s School Started Promoting AI Use in Class