This is our take on Bill Gates's essay The turbulent AI era is here (Gates Notes, August 2026). Read the original →
First, name a thing you are already seeing in the room.
The same homework, this term, comes back to you in three different shapes:
One, written by the student. Rough, uneven, mistakes only that particular child makes.
Two, written by the AI. Smooth, complete, tone consistent, possibly more polished than anything you would write on a good day.
Three, the tricky one. Written with the AI. It is no longer the child's sentence, but you do not have proof.
This is the new normal you are teaching into.
Gates devotes a whole passage of his newest essay to this.
On one side he is genuinely optimistic: "AI can free teachers up to spend more time working with students one on one or in small groups and give them a clearer view of where the whole class is struggling." This is real. Grading, drafting exercises, first-pass feedback, answering routine questions, most of that is work AI can already carry, and it was work that used to eat your evenings and your weekends.
Then, without a pause, he writes the sentence you should hold on to:
"One preliminary survey suggested that heavier AI use was associated with less critical thinking. The effect was stronger for younger people." And then, one line later: "This would be the worst possible time for humans to lose their critical thinking skills."
Translation:
The same tool that gives you time back with your students can quietly remove from your students the very thing you are trying to build in them. The line between those two effects is yours to draw.
Gates hands you one key phrase: productive struggle.
The exact sentence: an AI used well "preserves what researchers call 'productive struggle', the cognitive work that builds understanding." Concretely: when the student meets a new idea for the first time, the AI can give substantive explanations and offer both questions and answers. When it is checking that they have understood, it holds the answer back and helps them arrive at it on their own.
That one sentence is worth taping to your desk. It resolves the whole "is AI good or bad in the classroom" argument in one move:
Scaffolding. AI struggles with the student and makes the struggle more effective. It passes them the next question, an intermediate step, a counterexample, an analogy.
Shortcut. AI struggles for the student. The cognitive work that was supposed to happen in the student, happens somewhere else and is delivered pre-packaged.
On the surface they look almost the same. The difference is whether the student ends the assignment stronger.
Two questions you can use in the next essay you grade.
Every time an assignment shows the fingerprints of AI, ask yourself only two things:
One: Did the AI struggle for them, or did it help them struggle more effectively?
Two: Without the AI, can they solve the next problem in this sequence on their own?
Two yeses, this was scaffolding. Two nos, this was a shortcut. Somewhere in between, you owe that student a five-minute conversation.
Two moves for your teaching system.
First: do not choose between "AI allowed" and "AI banned" as your whole policy. Let your policy read: "On this stage of the assignment AI is scaffolding, on that stage AI is forbidden." For example: for pre-reading questions, AI is welcome. For the first draft, no AI. For revision, AI can give question-shaped feedback but cannot rewrite for the student. On exams, obviously not. When students see that you have your own layered system, they know you are neither in panic nor asleep at the wheel.
Second: explicitly protect a set of assignments as "must-struggle." In math, the derivations they have to walk through themselves. In language, the pieces where they have to name their own title, find their own example, arrive at their own thesis. In history, the essays where they have to judge cause and consequence for themselves. Tell them, out loud: "AI would ruin what this assignment is for. Please write this one yourself." Students hear this better than you expect them to.
One thing for you personally.
The whole thrust of Gates's essay carries one signal for you: this is not the era where teachers matter less. This is the era where teachers matter more than they have in a long time. The routine, the grading, the drafting, the answering, can be handed off. But the judgment call, what to hand off, and what must stay in the student's own hands, that is not a workflow, it is a decision. The person who makes that decision is you.
Half of what you did last semester will be quietly optimized away by AI in the next two or three. The other half, the half where you decide what this assignment is for, and what your student is supposed to grow, that is the part the era cannot take. Please put more of your strength into that half.
### Questions to sit with
1. Recall a moment when a student struggled toward the answer instead of being told it. What did they gain that a shortcut would have removed?
2. In the subject you teach, where is "productive struggle" most fragile, the exact place a well-meaning student would most easily let AI do the wrong work for them?
3. What is one small policy in your classroom you could add this month that keeps AI as scaffolding, not as shortcut?
from Bill Gates
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