This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.
Across the country, school districts are debating about putting guardrails on artificial intelligence and drafting cautious policies. Google just announced a three-year partnership aimed at training up to 6 million educators in AI tools, calling it its largest education effort in two decades.
Meanwhile, teachers like me are already in classrooms making real-time decisions about what AI actually means for students. The bigger conversation about who gets to shape the future of teaching pushed me to look inward.
I didn’t realize how much agency I had lost as a California teacher until AI showed me what I’d been missing. Not because AI was disruptive, but because it exposed something harder to face: how comfortable I’d become with waiting. Waiting for district guidance. Waiting for approved curricula. Waiting to be told not just what to do, but how to think.
Over time my work had shifted from lesson design to compliance. I had adopted academic programs instead of adapting them, implementing decisions made elsewhere instead of exercising my professional judgment. The scripted curricula, high-stakes testing and top-down mandates had slowly hollowed out the space where my professional judgment as an educator once lived.
AI didn’t create that pattern; it exposed it.
When Samantha, one of my students, asked, “When are we ever going to use math in real life?” the question lingered.
It was the kind of question that compliance culture had trained me to deflect rather than sit with. But I couldn’t deflect it this time. I knew the lesson I was delivering wasn’t landing.
The textbook examples didn’t reflect my students’ lives or the issues they were navigating.
I wanted them to look closely at what was happening in their own communities, to engage with material through a critical lens, and to see themselves in the learning.
Around that time, I decided to explore how AI might actually support my teaching, so I opened ChatGPT. Because AI is still new, no one holds a monopoly on expertise. For me, that created a rare opening.
I typed out what I was trying to design: a lesson grounded in local context, centered on real issues and requiring students to think critically rather than comply passively.
ChatGPT offered possible lesson plan structures, thematic angles and guiding questions to consider. I didn’t copy and paste its suggestions; I evaluated, revised and shaped them into something that reflected my students and my professional judgment.
I co-designed. I chose ideas that connected to my students’ voices and what was happening in the world around us. I questioned what the tool generated, pushed back on suggestions that did not fit, revised drafts and asked it to iterate.
AI sharpened my professional judgment and clarified my thinking. It helped transform my rough idea into a more focused, student-centered lesson. The result: a poster project where my students explored how math helps them understand the world around them by analyzing current events in their own communities.
I launched it by modeling the process myself, choosing a news article, explaining why it stood out to me, and showing how math could deepen our understanding of it. We identified the numbers, data and patterns embedded in the story and connected them to real mathematical concepts. We talked about why that math mattered and how it shaped our lives.
Samantha was one of the first students to finish her poster. She chose an article about preventing a projected $20 million budget deficit in Fullerton, the city where she lives and goes to school. Leaders were considering raising taxes, making it less affordable to live there.
In Samantha’s mathematical analysis, she examined a potential 2% tax increase, graphed trends over time and questioned why low-income residents would be impacted more than others.
The math wasn’t abstract to her. Any increase in taxes or fees could directly affect her family and the people around her.
That experience with AI exposed how much of my agency had gone dormant, buried under years of compliance.
This moment isn’t about technology. It’s about whether teachers will reclaim their role as designers of learning or wait to be told what to do next. Teachers don’t need permission to lead; they need to remember how.
Samantha never asked again whether math was relevant. She already knew.
