My Son's Teacher Told Him Not to Use AI

I’ve spent the last two years with AI every single day. Building things with it. Taking the models apart to understand how they actually work. Following the whole space as it moves. I’m not saying that to impress anyone — I’m saying it because it’s the lens I see this through. I use these tools deeply, and I’ve watched them change what’s possible for someone like me.

So here’s the thing that keeps bothering me.

My eldest has just started high school. First year. I help him with his homework most nights. And almost every time, he tells me the same thing: the teachers say don’t use AI.

Don’t use it. Like it’s something to be afraid of.

Their fear is cheating. And sure — some kids will cheat. Some kids have always cheated, long before any of this existed. But if the first thing you say about AI is “don’t touch it, you’ll cheat,” you’ve already pointed at the wrong thing. You’re so fixed on the one bad use that you’ve walked straight past the enormous good one sitting right next to it.

Because AI isn’t a cheat code. It’s a learning tool. The most powerful one I’ve ever held.

I’m a little bit autistic. The way my brain works, I have to fully understand one thing before I can move on to the next — I can’t just accept a fact on faith and carry on. For most of my life that made certain kinds of learning genuinely hard. A teacher explains something one way, and if that way doesn’t fit my head, I’m stuck.

AI changed that completely.

Now, when I don’t understand something, I can ask. And when the answer doesn’t land, I can say: try again, explain it differently, explain it like this. And it does. It keeps reshaping the explanation until it fits the shape of my head. That was a skill I had to learn — how to ask, how to push back, how to steer it toward the version I can actually absorb. But learning that skill is the whole point.

I’ve learned more in the last two years than I did in the previous twenty. And I learned a lot in those twenty — I’m a serial learner, always have been. But AI lets me dig into things at a depth I’ve never had access to before. Anything I’m curious about, I can follow all the way down.

You just have to be curious. You have to ask, and ask, and ask again. When you don’t understand, you don’t give up — you ask again. And you get there. The beauty of it is that the tool learns how you want to be answered.

I’m watching this happen with my son right now. When the AI says something back to him and he doesn’t get it, his instinct is to assume the AI got it wrong — that it doesn’t know, or it isn’t good enough. So he draws a line in the sand and stops. And that’s the exact moment I have to step in: no, don’t stop there. Keep asking. Keep working with it. Ask it to try again, ask it to explain it another way. That’s not failing — that’s how you use the tool.

And that’s really all I wanted to say with this first post.

We’re at a strange moment where some of our biggest institutions — schools, the people we trust to teach our kids how to think — still don’t really understand what this thing is. So they wrap it in fear and punishment, and frame it as something you shouldn’t touch.

They’ve got it backwards. We shouldn’t be teaching kids to fear AI. We should be teaching them how to use it — and lean into it.

Because it isn’t a way to avoid learning.

It’s the best learning tool any of them will ever have.