For thirty years I taught high-school mathematics in Canada, but the title on my door was never the whole job. I was also a Teacher-Advisor — the adult a teenager could come to for more than what was on the test. Kids showed up at lunch: a few to re-do a question, more of them to say something that had nothing to do with math and everything to do with the life they were quietly dreaming about.
Some of those students still write to me, to say a sentence I do not even remember saying followed them into adulthood and shaped a choice. All of it ran on one thing: trust.
What the people in the room just said
I thought about that this month when the numbers came in. A new [NPR/Ipsos poll](https://www.npr.org/2026/06/05/nx-s1-5779757/school-ai-education-students-teachers-poll-critical-thinking) of 545 K-12 teachers, published June 5, 2026, found that nearly three in four believe AI will change education more than the internet or the computer did. These are not technophobes: sixty percent already use AI in their own work, and roughly eighty percent think schools should teach kids to use it responsibly.
And in the same breath, the same teachers pulled the fire alarm. Fifty-four percent say AI makes it harder for students to learn to think critically. Fifty-five percent say it has become mostly a shortcut for avoiding the work. And nearly sixty percent say AI is eroding the trust between student and teacher. The students agree about themselves: in a December 2025 [RAND survey](https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA4742-1.html), sixty-seven percent said using AI for schoolwork harms their own critical thinking.
Thinking and trust are the whole job
Read those findings together and you have named the two things a teacher actually builds. Not answers — a machine has always handed those over faster than I can. Thinking, and trust. That is the job.
I know what the thinking looks like when it goes. As I write in my book, the student who reads the textbook without doing the problems is not studying — they are rehearsing the feeling of studying. AI industrializes that feeling. It produces a flawless, confident answer in two seconds, and the struggle that was supposed to build the mind never happens. I grew up behind the Iron Curtain, in a system that censored almost everything but left mathematics alone — it could not figure out how to weaponize a proof. For decades, people there were taught, for free, how to think. Then I watched North American schools delete logic and geometry proofs long before any chatbot arrived. Drop an answer-vending machine on a system that already stopped asking kids to prove anything, and you do not get smarter students. You get faster surrender.
And the trust? Trust is what let a fifteen-year-old walk into my room at lunch and admit they were lost. A kid who has quietly outsourced the work to a machine has a new reason to avoid the adult who might notice. That is the erosion those teachers are feeling — not about cheating software, but a teenager deciding the machine is safer to be honest with than the person.
Seven ways to protect the thinking and the trust
- Make the struggle come first — ten minutes of honest, messy attempt before any app opens. The struggle is not the obstacle to learning; it is the learning.
- Ask for the why, not the what. "Explain the steps back to me with the screen closed" tells you more than any answer a student can paste.
- Use AI to check reasoning, not to make it. "Where did my logic break?" builds a mind; "What is the answer?" rents one.
- Keep at least one proof alive. Demand one "show your work" on every assignment, with or without a machine in the room.
- Watch the clock honestly. Homework that drops from an hour to ten minutes is not efficiency — it is outsourcing wearing efficiency's coat.
- Be the adult it is safe to be lost in front of. A kid who can say "I do not get it" to a person never needs to hide behind a chatbot.
- Teach the tool on purpose. The eighty percent are right: pretending AI does not exist protects no one. Judgment is taught, not caught.
Who actually decides
The most powerful learning tool ever built has landed in a school system that already forgot why struggle matters — and the people who spend their days in that room just told us what it is costing. They are not asking us to ban the machine. They are asking us to remember what only a human at the front of the room was ever for. The technology will not decide how this turns out. The adults will.
Bogdan Marzewski, Author of 'From Communist Paradise to Freedom'