Why AI Is Removing the Bottom Rungs of Learning (And What Parents Can Do)
I’m folding Javi’s grass-stained soccer practice gear at the dining room table last week, a crumpled granola bar wrapper pushed to one side and the afternoon baseball game muted on the TV, when I glance over at his 13-year-old shoulder. He’s staring at a pre-algebra worksheet of word problems, one finger hovering over his Chromebook trackpad. Before he even finishes reading the first question about calculating paint for a backyard shed, he opens a new tab and pulls up his go-to AI tool.
“What do you think you’re doing?” I ask, not sharp, just curious.
He sighs, leans back, and spins in his chair. “It’s 10 stupid problems. I get how to do the slope stuff, I just don’t want to waste 20 minutes sorting through all the extra numbers when this can do it for me in 10 seconds. It’s just busy work anyway.”
That line stuck with me. I’ve tutored middle and high school kids after school for three years, so I’ve seen this play out more times than I can count. Last fall I worked with a 10th grader who needed help writing his first college entrance essay. I asked him to just scribble down three moments from high school that mattered to him, anything, no structure required. He stared at a blank page for 20 minutes and told me he couldn’t do it. He’d used AI to brainstorm and outline every major writing assignment since 7th grade, he said. He never learned how to pull his own thoughts out and sort them into order.
That’s when I understood what people mean when they say AI is removing the bottom rungs of the ladder. The bottom rungs aren’t the glamorous, impressive parts of learning that end up on report cards or college applications. They’re the boring, repetitive, sometimes messy small steps you do over and over again to build the muscle you need for harder work. Most people can’t jump from the ground to the third rung. You need the first two to stand on.
My sister teaches 11th grade English, and she brought up a similar example just last month. She had a student turn in a polished, well-argued final paper on teen social media use that would have graded out as an A. But when he stood up to present it to the class, he couldn’t answer the simplest questions. When another student asked what study he’d cited to back up his claim about anxiety rates, he shrugged and said AI had found the sources for him. He’d never actually read them, never sorted through bad studies to find good ones, never matched the research to his own argument. He skipped all the bottom rungs, so he had nothing to stand on when it was time to show what he knew.
I didn’t want to ban AI for Javi. It’s a tool, it’s not going anywhere, and he’ll need to know how to use it for college and work anyway. But I also didn’t want him to skip all the small practice steps that let him actually learn. So we sat down and negotiated a simple rule, no big fight, no strict restrictions. It’s worked pretty well so far.
The rule is this: any assignment, big or small, has three non-negotiable steps you have to do by hand, on paper, before you open AI. First, write what the assignment is asking you to do, in your own words. No copying the prompt straight from the worksheet. Second, list the first three small steps you need to take to get it done. Third, do that first step all the way through on your own, no help. After that, you can use AI however you want: to check your work, to fix grammar, to help you format a project, to brainstorm extra ideas if you get stuck.
For Javi’s pre-algebra problems, that means he reads each problem, writes what it’s asking for, lists out the relevant numbers, and solves the first two problems completely on his own before he uses AI to check his answers on the rest. It takes him 5 extra minutes, tops, and it means he’s still practicing the skill of sorting through information and working through the steps, instead of just getting the final answer. For a writing assignment, that means he brainstorms 10 ideas on paper and writes a rough outline of three main points before he uses AI to help him flesh out paragraphs.
I added one other small thing: if Javi really insists an assignment is just useless busy work, I shoot a one-sentence text to his teacher: “Javi’s wondering what skill this assignment is practicing—could you let me know if the practice is necessary?” Nine times out of 10, the teacher writes back that they’re working on this specific skill to prepare for a harder unit next month, and I show that text to Javi. He usually accepts it, because it’s not just me being mean—it’s what his teacher says he needs. Once, a teacher did say it was just extra credit busy work for kids who finished early, so we agreed Javi could do the first three problems by hand and use AI for the rest. That felt fair.
It’s only been a month and a half since we put this rule in place. Last week Javi presented his science fair proposal to his class, and he came home telling me he answered every question the judge asked him. He’d found his first two sources, sorted through his own ideas, and did all the early work himself, then used AI to format the final proposal and fix his typos. He knew his stuff because he’d stood on the bottom rungs himself.
I don’t think this is the perfect solution. AI is changing everything about school faster than most of us can keep up, and there’s a lot I still don’t know. Some days Javi forgets the rule, some days I forget to check, and some assignments it just doesn’t work as well. But so far, it’s low-effort, it doesn’t require banning anything, and it keeps those bottom rungs where they belong: under the kid’s feet, not done for them by someone (or something) else.
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