What Teachers Are Actually Telling Students About Their Future With AI
Last month, I volunteered to help clean up after my daughter Lila’s 11th grade college and career night. I was stacking discarded pizza boxes in the back of the gym, where the air still smells like floor wax and week-old lemonade from concessions, when Lila tugged my sleeve and pulled me over to her computer science teacher, Mr. Hale. She’d been worked up all week about a question she’d been dying to ask: if AI can write entire working programs in two minutes, why should she bother learning to write it herself?
Mr. Hale leaned against a folding table, twisting a half-empty water bottle, a coffee stain blotted on the hem of his gray polo. He’d just spent three hours talking to nervous kids and more nervous parents about tech degrees, and he laughed when he heard the question. That’s the question I get more than any other these days, he said. Then he told us about a senior from last semester who turned in a full meal-tracking app for his final project, written entirely by AI. It looked great on paper, but when Mr. Hale asked him to tweak the login screen so it worked better on iPhones, the kid stared at him blankly. He couldn’t read the code AI had written, let alone change it. That’s the first thing I tell all my kids: AI’s best at doing the boring, repetitive work you don’t want to do anyway. Your job isn’t to compete with it on that. Your job is to get good at the part it can’t do.
I stood there listening, because I’ve had the same worry. I’ve stayed up too late scrolling thinkpieces about how 30% of jobs will disappear by 2030, I’ve wondered if I should be pushing Lila into something “AI-proof” like nursing or construction, even if she lights up when she talks about writing stories and building small games for her friends. What I heard that night wasn’t the doomsday take I’d seen online, or the overly optimistic “AI will create more jobs than it replaces” line either. It was just plain, practical advice that educators are sharing with kids every day, that most parents haven’t caught up on yet.
After the code story, Mr. Hale broke down the three main things he tells every student who asks about the future. First, stop dropping fields you love just because AI can do part of the work. He said he had a student two years ago who loved creative writing and wanted to be a music journalist, who switched his major to cybersecurity right before college because he read AI would replace all writers. Now the kid texts him once a semester saying he hates coding and misses writing, and every local newspaper and music magazine Mr. Hale talks to is begging for writers who can do original interviews and fact-check bad sources and write a review that feels like a real person talking. AI can spit out a list of the 10 best albums of 2024, but it can’t sit through a two-hour interview with a songwriter and pull out the messy, human story of why they wrote those songs.
Second, practice using AI as a tool, not a replacement for your own brain. It’s not cheating to use it for brainstorming or editing or grunt work, he said, it’s cheating when you let it do the part of the work that’s supposed to teach you something. For example, instead of asking AI to write your entire history essay, ask AI to give you three different outlines for your argument on the New Deal, then you pick the one that makes sense to you, fill it in with your own analysis from class, and then ask AI to spot any gaps in your logic. That’s using AI to cut out the boring part so you can spend more time on the part that matters: learning how to build an argument.
That really stuck with me, because so many parents I know are banning AI from their kids’ homework entirely, scared it’s all just cheating. That’s the opposite of what kids need, right? If you ban AI entirely, they’re just going to learn how to hide it from you, not how to use it well. I’ve adjusted what I do with Lila since that night: when she complains about math homework, I don’t let her just plug the problem into AI for the answer. I make her ask AI to walk through a similar problem step by step, then solve the assigned one herself. When she was working on her first draft for a college prep essay last week, I had her ask AI for 10 different opening lines, then she threw all of them out and wrote her own. She said seeing all the generic, boring lines AI came up with helped her figure out exactly what she actually wanted to say. That’s a small shift, but it makes sense.
Third, Mr. Hale said, spend more time practicing working with people. AI can design a logo, but it can’t sit across from a small bakery owner who inherited the shop from her mom, listen to her talk about what the shop means to her, and adjust the design 10 times until it feels like her. AI can draft a lesson plan, but it can’t read the room when a room of 7th graders are bored or upset and switch gears mid-lesson to meet them where they are. So when you’re in group projects for school, volunteer to be the one that talks to the client or interviews the community partner. That’s not extra work, that’s practice for the job you’ll actually have.
After we talked, Lila and I drove to the ice cream place down the road, she got mint chocolate chip with extra fudge, I got vanilla. She said she’d been thinking of dropping her creative writing elective next semester because she thought it was useless if AI can write poems and stories. Now she’s going to stay in.
I still worry sometimes. I don’t know what jobs will look like when Lila graduates college, five years from now. No one does. Last week, I saw my 10th grade neighbor turning in a book report his AI wrote word for word, and I almost said something about cheating before I stopped. It’s not that cheating isn’t a problem, it’s that the old rules of what counts as learning are shifting, and the best advice we’ve got from the people who spend every day with kids isn’t to fear AI. It’s to teach kids to lean into the parts of work and learning that are uniquely theirs. We’re all figuring this out as we go, and that’s okay.
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