My youngest was born in March 2020 — the day most things started shutting down here in Texas. She’s a kindergartner now, six years old. One of her brothers is finishing 5th grade, and his class is the last group at his elementary school where every kid lost their kindergarten year to Covid. He spent that year on a screen at our kitchen table.
What if AI had existed that year?
I’ve been thinking about that a lot this week. Particularly as we enter the May graduation season. OpenAI just put out a piece calling the class of 2026 the first generation to start and finish college with ChatGPT. And right behind them are kids who will start and finish their entire schooling with AI as a fact of life.
The scale of AI impact feels even greater than Covid to me. But unlike Covid lockdowns, AI ain’t going anywhere.
Last night at dinner, I overheard a teacher at the next table talking about AI. She doesn’t use it. She doesn’t want her students using it. She had a list of reasons that I didn’t really disagree with — the energy and water costs of running these models, the copyright controversy, the worry that kids (and adults) will stop thinking for themselves. All real concerns. All worth thinking about.
The “stop thinking for themselves” one haunts me the most. I taught middle school math for years, and I made the same argument about calculators: the tool doesn’t kill the thinking, it frees it up for harder problems. AI is harder to defend that way. A calculator can’t write your essay or do your reasoning for you. We have to teach kids to interrogate AI, not just trust it — and I’m not sure any of us have figured out how to do that well yet.
We wrestle with the same questions at home. Do we let our 7th-grader use ChatGPT for his homework? The technology is moving faster than the guardrails are showing up, and we don’t have a clean answer.
Sheltering kids from AI completely is more dangerous than teaching them how to use it.
They’re going to use it regardless. Without us, they’ll meet it with no sense of how it works, where it falls short, or what it’s actually good for.
So at our house, we’re trying to model the messy version. We use AI in front of the kids. We have fun with it. We point out when it’s wrong, and it’s wrong a lot.
I’ve been experimenting with an AI assistant built on WordPress. With my kids I’ve set it up as a tutor. The idea is something like an always-on guide that meets them where they are, with adults still in the loop. Not a replacement for their teachers. Not a replacement for us. Something in between.
I don’t know if it’ll work. It might not. But I’d rather try and learn alongside them than wait until someone hands us the rules.
Now is not the time to hide. Not the time to wait and see. Let’s go all in and figure it out together.
Are you letting your kid use ChatGPT on homework? What’s working? What blew up in your face?
Leave a Reply