A high schooler writes about AI tools in the classroom

I recently found out that my nephew's school had no take-home homework before high school, instead having kids complete assignments during class time. At first, I was flabbergasted that they would deny kids the discipline building of managing unstructured time without direct supervision. Homework- at home- seemed like such a fundamental part of the schooling experience.

Now, I'm thinking that was pretty much they only way they could think of to ensure kids were doing things themselves.

I know it was a rough transition for my nephew, though, and I don't know that I would have handled it very well either. I'm not sure what would be a better option, though, given how much of a disservice such easy access to a mental crutch is.

I wish this had been a more common practice back when I was in school ~25 years ago. In my country (and former USSR places in general), it was very common for parents to do much of the homework for the children, as there was a lot of it and sometimes too hard for many of the kids to handle (at other times, parents wanted the kids to have better grades so they could brag about it).

I don't think I've ever seen a school essay back then that wasn't obviously written by a parent, i.e. the ye olde times version of "chatgpt write this for me". I'm of course no exception, even when I wasn't lazy my writers-by-trade folks heavily edited anything I had written as they would have found it shameful for me to present something in school wasn't "well-written".

> I don't think I've ever seen a school essay back then that wasn't obviously written by a parent, i.e. the ye olde times version of "chatgpt write this for me"

man. this didn't really exist in my midwest USA public education in the 90s/00s, I felt like I had to work hard for all of my grades and the teachers were actively trying to derail me from my goals. there was never a sense of, this work is an example of "good enough".

it wasn't until college that I had teachers who weren't so adversarial and actually seemed to care about teaching.