The High Cost of Silent Classrooms (article about AI as a teaching tool)

[Coventina]

Last year, I visited a seventh-grade math classroom in a public school in the Bronx. Twenty students sat bent over laptops, working with an A.I. tutor on story problems about converting fractions to decimals. A teacher moved around the room, checking a dashboard that tracked how many tries each student needed to reach the right answer.

On the surface, the classroom was working. Students were engaged, and most of them, eventually, were getting to the right answers.

When I looked closely, though, many of the students were lost. They didn’t understand fractions conceptually. Each time one of them made a mistake, the A.I. tutor backed up and suggested another step, but it never identified the underlying gap in understanding. The teacher could not see it either. Her dashboard showed which students were stuck, but not why.

The core intellectual work of teaching is noticing why a child’s understanding breaks down and then knowing what to do. It might mean pausing the class for a mini-lesson or pulling out fraction tiles for one student who needs to visualize the math. In the class I visited, that work had been handed to a tool that could do neither. No one was arguing about strategy or turning to the kid across the table to ask, “Wait, how did you get that?” Each child sat alone. Silent, in front of a screen, clicking away.

The cost of this silence is both cognitive and social. When artificial intelligence anticipates every step before a student even recognizes a hurdle, it strips away the productive struggle on which learning depends. Students need to wrestle with confusion to build their own understanding. The neuroscientist Mary Helen Immordino-Yang and her colleagues have shown that deep learning, the kind that sticks, happens when students connect what they are learning to bigger ideas and to their own lives. Replace dialogue and struggle with isolated screen time, and we disrupt the neural circuits that allow students to build knowledge.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/08/opinion/ai-classroom-silence-reform.html?

*********************************************************************************

But hey, if we don't worship at the altar of AI, we will be left behind by the AI Rapture.