We already had this fight once, and won

Every school is having the same fight about AI, and almost nobody fighting it has noticed we already had it once, and won. The machine was the calculator.

It frightened teachers in exactly the way the chatbot does now, and we settled it so completely the rule went invisible. You take the calculator away when you’re testing whether the kid can add. You hand it back the instant the problem turns into distance-rate-time. The tool is removed exactly when the skill it automates is the skill under examination, and gets added back in when it’s assisting a different skill.

Which means there’s no school-wide answer, because there’s no school-wide skill. It’s one assignment at a time: is the thing the tool automates the thing I’m trying to measure here? Though nothing in the rule tells you how to remove the tool when the assignment goes home with the student, and I don’t have a clean answer for that.

Somewhere in the writing of this I went to an LLM to solve a distance-rate-time problem. I have a minor in math. But I’d banked long division once already and nobody was testing me on it, so the rule says hand me the calculator and stop worrying about it.

That enforcement gap is real, and it still isn’t the thing that worries me most: