The Weekend My Kid Lost Credit for Making Slides Look Good
Last weekend a family member of mine sat at my kitchen table for two days straight. Their history teacher told the class they could not use AI to gather content for an assignment, so they didn’t. They pulled sources themselves, they read them, they took notes.
Then came the presentation. They didn’t want it to look like every other Google Slides deck in that class. They asked AI to help make it look better with a cleaner layout, stronger visuals, and more engaging aesthetic. The thinking was theirs, the research was theirs; AI just handled the design layer.
Their teacher didn’t give them credit.
I get the instinct behind the rule. If AI can write the essay, the essay stops telling you anything about the student. But this family member didn’t use AI to skip the thinking. They used it to make the container prettier. And in a history class, the container was never the point.
As a parent, that stung. As someone who has spent twenty years helping teachers design project-based learning, it also confirmed something I’ve believed for a long time: the line between “AI did the learning” and “AI polished the output” is real, and it’s worth drawing. But the line has to be drawn around what the assignment is actually measuring. If you’re grading historical thinking, grade the thinking. If the slides are decoration, treat them like decoration.
What I keep coming back to is that this person learned more that weekend than they would have if they’d been allowed to let AI do the research. The restriction worked for the part it was aimed at. It just didn’t anticipate the part where a teenager wants their work to look good and reaches for the nearest tool.
Parenting in this era of AI is tough, especially with middle and high school kids. The line between “cheating” and “efficiency” is incredibly grey. If you have learned any lessons along the way that might help our parent community, please share!
If this resonates, you might also like my Substack post on what MIT’s new AI report means for teachers ; it pairs this story with practical steps for clarifying success criteria and building formative checkpoints into AI-era assignments. Find it at drjennypieratt.substack.com.
About the Author: Jenny
