The students, who have been navigating their years at Mountain View High School through the advent and rapid evolution of generative AI, said the technology is necessarily forcing a reckoning with what classroom instruction should prioritize.
“Education for the past, like, 10, 15 years ... has been focused on memorization in a lot of the classes like biochem, even math. It’s a lot more focused on memorizing formulas and facts rather than critical thinking and communication, collaboration, and all of these soft skills, and AI has really exposed that,” Yash, a junior, said.
The students described feeling both inspired and overwhelmed by the proliferation of AI tools at FETC. According to Myra, who is a sophomore, AI has made school a lot easier in some ways.
“For example, there’s Google NotebookLM or other tools that help with summarization or making podcasts, so I kind of grasp the information better, and I think I've retained it better, than compared to traditional learning," she said.
However, she also pointed to unintended consequences, including a return to analog methods as teachers try to prevent cheating.
“We’re going back where we’re writing everything by hand, where writing essays, we have to write them all on paper,” she said. “We’re not allowed to search up things. We’re not allowed to look at online dictionaries. So I think in both senses, it’s positive and negative.”
Rather than banning AI, the students advocated for controlled integration.
“One of my English teachers I thought was doing a great job,” Myra said. “ We use AI to create an outline, and in that outline we can use our own thoughts. We can kind of talk back and forth with the AI and develop an outline that we really like and that makes sense to us, as well as including creative bits here and there. But then at the end, we use that outline, but we have to write the paper on our own. And so that's making sure we know how to write, we know how to phrase sentences, but also allowing us to utilize AI in the process.”
Both students emphasized that assignments focused on soft skills — communication, presentation and collaboration — are more resistant to AI shortcuts and more valuable for their futures.
