In 10th grade, frustrated by algebra, I went to Google, typed in “math solver” and found a website called Gauth. I typed in the equation I needed help with and the answer appeared. I was shocked to see how easy it was to just be done with my homework.
The answer came with a sequence of steps on how the AI got to the answer it did, so I looked at each step and tried my best to make sense of it.
But algebra was the only class I wanted AI’s help with. I was fairly sure AI couldn’t write a paper as well as I could, and that an AI-written essay would get a worse grade than one I wrote myself. Yet it seemed that my fellow students thought otherwise. Over the course of the fall semester of sophomore year, and into junior and senior year, more and more of my friends and classmates began using it. One friend joked about being unable to answer her name without asking ChatGPT first.
Last fall, I began to notice strange things about my assignments and the comments on them in my Advanced English Class. The material we read seemed disconnected from the questions being asked. I wondered if I just didn’t understand my teacher’s style, but my friends in the class were confused by the assignments too.
One day in November, I finished the in-class assignment early. My desk was close enough to see my teacher’s computer screen, its bluish-white light illuminating her face. My bored gaze wandered to her screen, and I watched her upload a Google Doc of a classmate’s essay to Google Gemini and type “Give feedback to [student’s name]”.
The teacher copied and pasted the AI results into a private comment to that student, without reading the student essay or the AI results she was pasting.
Swiftly, Gemini spit out paragraphs of feedback. The teacher copied and pasted the AI results into a private comment to that student, without reading the student essay or the AI results she was pasting. I watched for several minutes as she returned AI feedback to student after student.
On the left side of her screen was a wall of past conversations between my teacher and Google Gemini. Among them were prompts mentioning previous assignments and even full Google Slides presentations.
She wasn’t doing any work: Everything was AI-generated. She had cheated us out of proper learning—the kind that can only take place by one mind trying to comprehend and guide another—by replacing herself with AI. It was just me and the rest of my class going back and forth with Google Gemini. Outrage quietly grew within me, although I hid my discovery from her.
So I reported the teacher to the assistant principal of English, who said, in part, “Your preference [for your teacher not to use AI] is not a policy we have to enforce.”
I asked this principal and a former teacher of mine what the AI policy was. They both said that teachers were told that they could use AI for grading.
It dawned on me: Why do my work? After all, it wasn’t being scrutinized by a human eye. If my classmates were using AI to write their essays and my teacher was using AI to review those same essays, then what is the point of school? Doing your work used to be a test of character and your brain and your ability to understand and engage with the content. But now it has been reduced to a quick Google search for your chosen AI platform. Even for the more tedious and mundane tasks, exercising your brain will help you in the future, when you’ll inevitably be faced with those same tasks again.
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