I Want My Students’ Effort, Not AI’s Shortcut to Perfect Writing

This story was published by a Voices of Change fellow. Learn more about the fellowship here.

It’s my ninth grade English class, and we are at the end of our unit on “A Raisin in the Sun.” We were writing an essay on the American Dream and the barriers marginalized people experience as they strive to achieve it. We focused on themes such as institutional oppression as it relates to housing in Chicago and interpersonal oppression as it relates to how Walter treats Ruth and Beneatha.

This process of evidence selection and connecting it to real world experiences provides an opportunity to push oneself and dig deeper into the physical text to surface relevant material, but because we are reading a play — which is difficult to navigate due to stage and actor directions — most of my students were trying to find a way out of the researching process once they had to find textual evidence to support their ideas.

During our essay writing, one of my students excitedly approached me with their essay’s introduction. I read it over, and immediately, I could tell something was off. This student and I had been working all year on their spelling and grammar, and suddenly, both were perfect. The structure of each sentence flowed smoothly, using language I have not known this student to use in their writing in class. I asked him to tell me what the words in his writing meant, and he could not. I asked him to summarize his writing, but he could not.

Then, I took a deep breath and asked the dreaded question: “Did you use AI?” I watched as he shrank in embarrassment in front of me.

I did not feel angry but worried, and honestly, sad. I explained to him that I would rather his most fragmented, incoherent writing than this. I want his voice and his effort, regardless of what that looks like. I could tell he was frustrated with me because, at the end of the day, I asked him to push past the discomfort of returning to the text. I wanted him to be resilient and to see the challenge of familiarizing himself with the plot as an opportunity to fortify his memory, especially because his IEP explicitly stated that he needs support with this skill.

Academic resilience is when a student sees challenges as opportunities for growth; emotions such as frustration, impatience and doubt are replaced with self-belief, determination and confidence. A student who has academic resilience will see any provided task, with teacher support, as an opportunity to grow in some capacity. As I worked with this student, I recognized that the resilience wasn’t there. As he realized he could not recall the plot, he did not want to turn to the book, ask a classmate or ask me. Each of these actions is a skill in and of itself — turning to the book would require patience and determination as he reviews the material and asking a classmate or me requires bravery and listening skills. All these skills are useful in the real world, but artificial intelligence did not allow for any of these skills to be sharpened.

When students are given a myriad of digital ways to avoid opportunities to build their academic resilience, it becomes our responsibility to teach them the power and importance of their full abilities.

Reading and writing offer opportunities for academic resilience through the challenges they present. Turning a page, placing a Post-it note or underlining important evidence allows for motor skill development. Stopping at the end of the page to summarize enables a student to strengthen their short-term memory recall.

On top of these more granular developmental skills, the process of finding evidence itself can be frustrating because it means rereading and, at times, relearning to create the connections needed to support one’s argument. Building frustration tolerance is key to all aspects of life: whether it’s completing chores, driving or navigating conflict, many aspects of life can be frustrating. With the expediency of AI, low frustration tolerance is enabled, as any task perceived as difficult has an easy out. This has severe implications as young people, and especially those from disenfranchised backgrounds, are not given the critical thinking skills to thoughtfully analyze the world around them.

High frustration tolerance is key in areas outside of essay writing: reading a lease or a contract and identifying what raises concerns about one’s rights. Understanding local legislation during voting seasons requires the same skills of researching and asking questions about how their lives will be affected. These skills allow students to go on to be active agents in their lives and their communities. Without high frustration tolerance, we outsource our power, our insight and our capacity for making connections.

When we talk about technology, we talk about it as an exclusively digital experience. Yet books such as the serials by Charles Dickens were first popularized in the 1800s as a result of the Industrial Revolution. The pervasive printing press allowed for texts of all kinds to be printed more rapidly and expansively.

Helping students engage with physical texts to build their motor skills and academic resilience is also a technological tool that can support student learning. Reading physical books, holding a pencil and writing on paper is not an aberration from technology but an equally legitimate participation in it. While AI might have its benefits, our task as teachers is not to provide it as a regular tool, but instead to teach discernment: when will it support my brain development, and when will it not?

Our brains are so useful to us, but they can only continue to be so if we engage with our thoughts by building discipline and discernment. AI is unavoidable, but instead of denying its presence and enforcing consequences when students use it, I believe we should teach students the power of their innate skills as human beings and why those skills are relevant to their lives.