Ninety degrees and climbing, another Vegas scorcher was coming in. This was a fire drill but I was sweating much more than I had been five minutes prior. I'm standing in front of Saville Middle School holding a Westcott yardstick with a laminated paper taped to it that reads 804— a makeshift flag identifying the class I'm in charge of. Protocol demanded I stand until someone told us to return inside to the comfortable cold of the classroom.
Most of the students sat on a low brick wall by the street. Some were on their phones, others took the chance to catch up with friends in other classes. One girl in front of me is twelve, with thick springs of hair, talking in short strings of rapid speech. I overheard her mention something about "AI-ing it."
"What kind of AI do you use?" I asked her with casualness.
She explained that she was using Grok for her Diary of Anne Frank character report. Further, she said she liked it because she can take a picture of the prompt.
"They can't tell, that it's AI?" I asked.
"They say they do, check. But they can't."
I figured that must be a bluff from the teachers. AI checker on AI text is two drops of liquid, one can't help absorb and accept the other.
The student clarified that she doesn't use AI all the time. But for this report (and because it was the last 9 days of school), she was just over it and fired it up.
In his 1952 short story, Such, Such Were the Joys, George Orwell wrote:
“The gods are jealous, and when you have good fortune you should conceal it.”
Even a middle schooler knows that.
At the beginning of second period, I stand outside of the door to greet students on the way in. Upon seeing me, several of them cheered. A tanned-skin girl in a navy cheer shirt said, "This is the best day of my life. She's not here." I don't know whether the teacher deserves the nickname and I never will. As a substitute I'm a witness, not a judge. What the teacher has (or hasn't) established is none of my business to influence.
Influenced by the mostly dull morning it reminded me how most of school is tedium. The good lectures and laughs with friends are the bright fractional minutes inside long hours of waiting. The default state is being confined by law to sit in subject-siloed rooms designed like soft prisons. I felt this when I was a kid; now the kids in front of me feel it more. They were raised on lockdown culture and the infinite window of the internet on demand. I don't fault their curiosity for the tools of their time. Modern school wasn't designed with smartphones in mind.
Later during lunch, I started thinking about how I would design a teaching program around AI from the ground up.
Two weeks ago I was at a lunch with two friends. David and Kristen have a two-year-old, Enzo. I mentioned I was working on a lot with AI, and that someone could build a school experience for a kid like him— not a curriculum, but a system that follows his curiosity wherever it goes. They seemed interested, but I hadn't thought of next steps. The class was silently taking a math test, so I began to ponder:
How would I build it? My first thought went back to my unofficial childhood teacher: video games. When I was young, console games were going mainstream. Games were "hair on your nuts" hard. And there were no wikis, YouTube tutorials, or Discords to help. You just played until you learned it or quit. What helped was those early games were bounded— a finite set of moves, a finite map— and inside those bounds you built creative adaptation. That's how I learned many lessons from games like Super Metroid and Final Fantasy Tactics.
The trouble is that working with an LLM is not like Super Mario Bros. It's closer to Final Fantasy XIV. The boundaries are real but huge and invisible. A kid won't bump into walls and could just wander off in any direction. Or worse, become so dependent on the instant answers that they don't learn how to think.
So the introduction has to be guided: a smaller, bounded version of the tool, scaffolded so the curiosity stays alive long enough to teach itself. I thought about the girl during the fire drill. Already, she was using AI to draft her reports. Who knows what she'll be able to do by the time she graduates from high school. With careful scaffolding and guidance, LLMs could enhance her education and overall life. Which future she will get is unknown.
It is my hope to construct a framework future students can use to master this technology in their own way, in their own time. Seeing the usual after school clutter, shredded pieces of paper, discarded pencils, chairs askew, was a reminder this would likely have to be done outside of the bounds of traditional K-12 education.
