My youngest was born in March 2020, right as everything here in Texas started shutting down. She’s six now, in kindergarten. One of her brothers is finishing 5th grade, and his class is the last group at his elementary where every kid lost kindergarten to Covid. He spent that year at our kitchen table, staring at a laptop.
I keep wondering what that year would have looked like if AI had been around.
It’s been on my mind all week, probably because it’s graduation season. OpenAI just put out a piece calling the class of 2026 the first to start and finish college with ChatGPT. Right behind them are kids who will never know school without it. My kindergartner is one of them.
I think AI is going to hit schools harder than Covid did. The difference is that Covid ended.
At dinner last night I eavesdropped on a teacher at the next table. She doesn’t use AI. She doesn’t want her students using it either. Her reasons were good – the energy and water these models burn through, the copyright mess, the worry that kids stop thinking for themselves. And I didn’t disagree with any of it.
I taught middle school math for years and I made the calculator version of this argument to anyone who would listen. The tool doesn’t kill the thinking, it moves the thinking somewhere harder. I still believe that about calculators. AI is a tougher sell because a graphing calculator never wrote a kid’s essay completely for him. We have to teach kids to argue with AI instead of trusting it, and I don’t think anybody has cracked how to do that yet. I sure haven’t.
We’re no better at home. Our 7th grader wants to use ChatGPT on his homework and we go back and forth on it every few weeks. The tech is moving faster than we can come up with rules, so mostly we’re deciding assignment by assignment.
But I keep coming back to the same thing. Keeping kids away from AI entirely is riskier than teaching them how to use it.
They’ll find it with or without us. Without us, they meet it with no idea how it works, where it breaks, or what it’s actually decent at.
So we do the messy version at our house. We use it in front of the kids. We goof around with it. We point out when it’s wrong, which is a lot, and the kids have gotten pretty good at catching it themselves.
I’ve also been building an AI assistant on WordPress, and I set up a version of it as a tutor for my kids. Always there, meets them where they are, with adults still in the loop. Not a stand-in for their teachers or for us. Something in between, I hope.
It might flop. I’d still rather stumble through it alongside them than wait around for someone to hand us the rules.
So how about you? Are you letting your kid use ChatGPT on homework?
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