What To Do When Your Teen Writes Their Essay Using AI
The kitchen counter was still sticky with melted ice cream when I leaned over my 10th grader Sam’s shoulder to check his English essay last month. He was half-watching TikTok on his phone, one foot swinging from the kitchen stool, and had left his laptop open to the finished To Kill a Mockingbird response due first period the next day. I scanned the first paragraph, and immediately paused. The sentences were smooth, formal, and completely unrecognizable. There was none of his usual tangents about how all fictional dads are way calmer than me, no offhand joke about Scout’s overalls being cooler than any of his own hoodies. It was all generic stuff about moral courage and historical context, like a textbook someone copied and pasted. “Did you write this?” I asked. Sam didn’t even lie. “AI did,” he said, shrugging. “Everyone does it. It’s just a 500 word response, it barely counts for my grade.”
I was tempted to yell. I’d grown up with the hard rule that any outside help on an essay was cheating, and I’d spent years drilling into him that turning in work that’s not yours is wrong. But then I remembered two weeks before, when he’d sat at that same stool for an hour and a half staring at a blank document for a different essay, finally slammed his laptop shut and said he was just bad at writing and why did it even matter. He turned that one in three days late for half credit, even after I sat with him to brainstorm. So I didn’t yell. I pulled the empty stool next to him and sat down. “Okay,” I said. “Let’s read it together. What do you actually think about Atticus?”
It turned out Sam thought Atticus was boring. He said Atticus just sat around while everyone else did all the hard stuff, and he related because when he coaches his little sister’s U8 soccer team, he mostly just stands around yelling “kick it” and that’s it, same as Atticus. That was his real take, and the AI essay didn’t have a trace of it. So we started pulling it apart. First, we cut the line that talked about layered systemic injustice in Maycomb that Sam had no clue how to explain, because his teacher never even expected that for a 10th grade quick response. Then we added his soccer coach line, tied it back to how quiet consistency counts more than big speeches. Then we went through every paragraph and swapped the fancy AI words for how Sam actually talks. Where the AI wrote “Atticus demonstrates unwavering integrity in the face of community pushback,” Sam wrote “Atticus did the right thing even when everyone in town hated him for it.” The whole process took 22 minutes, according to the microwave clock, because we stopped once to yell at his little sister for drawing on the fridge with a crayon. It was way less work than forcing him to start over from scratch.
A week later, I brought the whole situation up to Sam’s English teacher at parent-teacher conferences. I expected her to say she’s cracking down on AI, that any kid caught using it gets a failing grade. But she just laughed. She said she sees at least three fully AI-written essays a week, and she doesn’t bother failing kids for it anymore, because that just teaches them to get better at hiding it, not get better at writing. That conversation changed how I think about the whole issue, and she gave me three small, concrete things we’ve started doing at our house that work way better than a full ban.
First, stop asking “did you use AI?” That automatically puts kids on defense, and they’ll lie even if they only used it to brainstorm. Instead, ask “what part of this did you write, and what did AI help you with?” I started doing that, and Sam doesn’t shut down anymore. Last week, he told me he used AI to come up with three opening ideas for his history essay on the New Deal because he couldn’t get past the first sentence. That’s way better than him hiding it from me.
Second, set clear, simple rules for what AI can and can’t do. We agreed AI can help you brainstorm when you’re stuck, fix a clunky sentence that won’t come out right, or summarize a long reading you don’t have time to finish. It can’t write the whole essay for you. No complicated fine print, no confusing loopholes, just one easy rule to remember.
Third, if they do turn in a whole AI essay (which they will, because they’re teens and they procrastinate), don’t make them start over. Just work through it together like we did, cutting what they don’t understand, adding their own thoughts, and rewriting it to sound like them. It teaches them that AI is a starting point, not a finished product.
I still have moments where I worry I’m letting him cut too many corners. I grew up writing every essay by hand in study hall, and it’s hard to shake the idea that any help is cheating. But Sam’s writing grade has gone from a C- to a B- this semester, and he doesn’t cry about homework anymore. Last week, he forgot all about a biology essay on cell division that was due the next morning, and I caught him pasting a full AI response into Google Docs at 9 pm. We didn’t panic. We sat down, cut out all the jargon he didn’t understand, added his own line about how he messed up his last lab because he mixed up mitosis and meiosis, and turned it into something that was his. He got a B-. He was fine with it. Before all this, he would have just turned in nothing and gotten a zero.
We don’t have this all figured out. Sam still procrastinates, he still tries to get AI to do all the work sometimes, and we still end up rearranging essays the night before they’re due more often than I’d like. But I’ve stopped seeing AI as some big threat to good writing. The point of assigning essays isn’t to make kids suffer through staring at a blank page for hours. It’s to teach them to organize their thoughts and say what they think. AI can write the words, but it can’t think for my kid. And that’s the part we’re still practicing, one sticky kitchen counter essay at a time.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » What To Do When Your Teen Writes Their Essay Using AI