Teaching in the Age of AI

By: Mansi Viswanath

From chatbots that help with homework to programs that grade essays and generate personalized study plans, AI is becoming a powerful classroom tool – whether for the better or worse. As schools explore how to integrate AI responsibly, one thing is clear: the technology is reshaping education in ways no one can ignore.

But how do the people at the front of the classroom really feel about this technology shift? To find out, I interviewed teachers from different departments:

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I started off with Mr. Jackman, our school’s AP World History and AP European History teacher, who shared his candid thoughts on the role of AI in the modern world: “Initially, my first experience was really bad,” he claims. When students began using ChatGPT and similar GenAI tools to complete assignments, he found that many were submitting work they didn’t understand. “The student didn’t know the material we were covering,” he explained, noting that while AI helped them finish faster, it left them unprepared for the AP exam and prevented him from knowing how much he should help each student. 

Over time, however, his opinion began to change. He discovered that when used correctly, AI could be a powerful searching tool. “Not everything I want is available in textbooks or documents,” he said. “But when prompted correctly, ChatGPT can produce document-based questions with sourcing materials and follow-up questions.” Once he carefully evaluated the results – cross-checking that the documents were valid and the DBQs were of appropriate rigor and quality – he found that some of these materials could even be shared with students as learning resources.

As a history teacher himself, Mr. Jackman’s primary issue centers around AI’s impact on the interpretation of history and the future of education. He speaks of an “AI-generated hall of mirrors,” warning that as AI becomes more and more involved in creating and curating information, the line between truth and fabrication could blur. “For now,” he explained, “there are still historians who know how to read texts and make serious arguments. But at some point, that won’t be the case”. He worries that if interest in rigorous academic research continues to decline people will begin to accept versions of history that align with their own beliefs.

Beyond the interpretation of AI, Mr. Jackman also questions what AI means for education in the future. He worries that as both teachers and students increasingly rely on AI, genuine learning and critical thinking will slowly begin to fade away. “If this trend continues,” he warns, “what happens if you have professors using AI generated prompts, students using AI generated responses, which are generated by AI generated readers?” For Mr. Jackman, this shift not only devalues the work of educators but also undermines centuries of human learning built on discussion, writing, and face-to-face connection. 

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Mr. Harris, our campus’s AP US Government/Politics and APUSH teacher, parallels Mr. Jackman’s take, instead observing AI’s effects through a lens of politics and philosophy. He uses to quickly put two different perspectives/sources into conversation with each other. 

The deeper danger of AI for him lies not in its immediate effects on education or work, but in what it could mean for how humans think. “Education,” he asserts, “teaches you the ability to exercise what you choose to think about”. At its core, school is meant to be a space where students learn to question, analyze, and form their own opinions – developing the independence to decide how and why to think. As AI becomes more and more integrated into education, it may invert this crucial purpose, turning learning into a passive process rather than an active one. “It teaches us what to think,” he said, “based on an arbitrary formula, a massive database. But we [as humans] don’t operate as databases”. Instead of encouraging students to wrestle with uncertainty and develop their own perspectives, AI could make it too easy to accept ready-made ideas. Thus, for Mr. Harris, his primary concern lies in AI’s ability to steal students’ ability to think independently and decrease the agency and choice they have over what they choose to think about. 

On a more global scale, Mr. Harris sees AI not just as a mirror reflecting the inequalities and motivations of the society that created it. To him, AI’s rapid expansion, driven by competition and profit, reflects broader economic and social forces rather than a collective pursuit of progress. This concept boils down to the principle of technological determinism, a theory where technology is the primary driver of societal change, whether for good or for bad. 

Since we’re still early in AI’s development, with its popularity starting only two to three years ago, it’s hard to ascertain its true impacts, whether it’s for the better, for the worse, or perhaps a more realistic mix of both. “With all that being said,” Mr. Harris concedes, “I would like to see a reality where AI becomes more and more sophisticated” – an opinion that we at the Preparatory Press agree with. “Philosophically I’m interested in it…to see how closely it can mimic human behavior and thought – or if it’s even possible”.

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Ms. Murthy, our school’s AP Biology and Advanced Biomedical Engineering teacher, brings a perspective filtered through a lens of science, where AI is transforming how we understand life itself.

“I’m a dinosaur,” she joked, “but I’ve started using AI to make my teaching more efficient,” using it to compile practice material and generate a couple worksheets. Still, she’s careful not to let it replace her own instructions. “I don’t use AI to make lecture slides,” she said firmly. “I want to gear the curriculum toward what I want to teach.”

But these efficiencies come with caveats. She reminds her students to always verify AI-generated sources as such tools will often “hallucinate,” inventing citations or false facts, even when she feeds her own key terms into advanced models like Claude. Rather than punishing students for using AI, her main goal lies in helping students parse through the dense content of biology independently.

For her, human imperfection is part of authenticity. Reflecting on her first PhD paper, she laughs, “It was a sea of red – my advisor marked every single word. But that’s how clarity develops: through revision, not automation.” This same philosophy carries into her teaching and her advice to students part of her class and as they began preparing for college applications. She cautions them that institutions increasingly use AI-detection tools to verify the originality of essays and letters of recommendation, emphasizing that it’s better for their writing to sound imperfect– and ultimately human and genuine – than polished by an algorithm. 

Ms. Murthy sees AI as a double-edged sword, one capable of immense progress and profound harm. She believes that AI will play a central role in healthcare and biotechnology, where it can analyze the vast complexity of biological systems and uncover patterns that would be nearly impossible for humans to detect. As she explains, “It’s really hard for the human brain to connect one point over here to one point over there, but AI, as a machine, can do that.” Its computational power allows it to synthesize and correlate massive amounts of biological data, such as protein interactions or cellular pathways, at a scale or speed that far exceeds human capacity, which allows for treatments and diagnostics that could revolutionize the healthcare field. At the same time, AI carries the risk of misuse – whether through unintended errors, the creation of harmful biological agents, or inequitable access to its benefits.

The common thread among Mr. Jackman, Mr. Harris, and Ms. Murthy’s views on AI is the need for balance – leveraging AI’s capabilities while maintaining human judgement, critical thinking, and ethical responsibility. In the end, AI’s impact on education and society as a whole will be defined not only by its algorithms, but by the values and choices of the people who wield it.