# He told me he felt like he could finally read

Source: https://aaronmakelky.com/blog/ai-in-education-friction-question-not-tool-question
Last updated: 2026-03-27

A student told me the tool let him read. The hard part was deciding which friction was still the work. From a Skilling Future Podcast conversation about AI inside a school.

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Field notes

March 27, 2026 · 10 min read

Classroom AI · Literacy · Podcast

A student in my high school social studies class read at a third-grade level. One of the hardest-working kids I have ever taught. We handed students like him college-level readings and said good luck.

So I taught him to build a system in ChatGPT around how he actually learned. He liked working out. He liked hunting, fishing, and trucks. He knew what reading level felt manageable. He could take a speech from a 19th century German chancellor and get it back in language that clicked for him, with analogies that connected to his world, not mine.

After a few weeks he told me it felt like a step stool that put him on the same shelf as everyone else in the room. He could sit in the back row with his keyboard and get himself unstuck without needing me to hover over him every five minutes.

Nobody taught him that. Nobody gave him permission. He just needed someone to show him the tool existed and let him make it his own.

I talked about this with Andy Lucchesi on the [Skilling Future Podcast](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JoZXbV-w8Bo), and the conversation kept circling back to one idea: AI removes friction. The hard part is deciding which friction helps students learn and which friction just gets in the way.

## I was bad at using it

I first saw ChatGPT the way a lot of teachers did. A student shoved a phone in my face in November 2022 and said, hey, you're into technology, have you seen this thing?

I had not.

I went home that night, signed up with a Google account, and started messing with it. I did not understand what it was or how it worked. But I had the same gut reaction a lot of classroom teachers had early on: this is going to change how we teach and how students learn. I just did not know how.

So in January 2023 I did the most teacher thing imaginable. I tested it on my own assignments. I wrote the essays, took the quizzes, ran the projects through ChatGPT before my students did. At first the output was bad enough that I thought, all right, this thing is not replacing me anytime soon.

Then came the more uncomfortable realization: I was bad at using it. The results improved as I got better at asking.

I had already lived through one version of this as a history teacher. I started in a world of textbooks, paper notes, and waiting around for information. Then came Google, Wikipedia, and a laptop in every student's hands. A lot of friction around just finding stuff disappeared overnight. I was one of the history teachers who decided memorizing facts could not be the whole point. It is part of learning, sure, but it is not where you should finish.

AI felt like the next version of that same shift. A personalized Wikipedia that can also help you study, summarize, translate, and reorganize information around the way you actually learn.

## If the essay takes 10 minutes now, what do we do with the other 80?

Writing is a huge part of secondary social studies. Traditionally that means writing workshops, conference time, tutor centers, and one teacher trying to help 30 kids at once. There is only one of me. There are always more students who need feedback than there is time in the period.

So I started asking a basic question: if I can write clear enough instructions for a custom GPT to help students brainstorm and revise before they submit, why would I not do that? If a student wants writing help at 2:00 AM on their phone, great. That removes friction from the feedback process. I do not have to personally do all of that anymore.

What scares a lot of educators is what comes after. That essay used to take 90 minutes in class. Now a student can do it better in 10 or 15. So what do we do with the rest of the time?

I think you use that time for the stuff that needs a teacher in the room: discussion, revision, argument, and feedback. If AI handles blank-page panic and first-pass organization, class time can move toward the work students cannot get from a blank chat box.

One of the simplest things I started doing was telling students: here is the assignment we have always done, now take Gemini canvas mode and build something that shows me what you learned. I told them I was not grading the end product. I was grading the thinking process I could see in the chat log.

Pretty soon I had students building Oregon Trail style decision-making games. One student coded a history game and made me play it as the assessment. I had to move through historical events as if I was the leader, and the game told me whether I was right or wrong. He made me play the game he built to prove he knew the content.

I never would have thought of that. But when you give students a blank canvas and say go, you find out what happens when they stop treating the essay as the only serious container for thought.

## Just use what you already have

A huge struggle for educators is IT departments blocking things. It takes six months (or longer!) to get a site unblocked. My advice is always the same: you probably already have access to something. Just start with what you have and get good at it.

Last school year, nobody in my building knew they had Gemini. Google baked it into the apps for education suite. No memo went out, staff and students had it on their accounts but nobody told them.

People love to ask me what the best model is, what the best app is. I tell them to use the one they have. Until you find things it cannot handle, why are you looking for something else? If you are a Microsoft school, you have Copilot. If you are a Google school, you have Gemini. They are not always the best tools on the market, but they are the most accessible. You do not have to waste time evaluating vendors and finding the budget. Start with what is already open and already paid for.

## Banning AI is training kids for a world that no longer exists

I understand the fear. A lot of resistance comes from a good place. Teachers want students to think, struggle, write, and learn on their own. I want the same thing.

Where I disagree with a lot of the response is in the solution.

There is a faction in every faculty that wants to block the tools and go back to paper and pencil. My challenge to those people: are you serving students for the future they are going into, or are you trying to prepare them for 1988 when you went to college?

No boss is going to tell a graduate to write reports by hand so they know the employee did not use AI. They are going to say use it responsibly and turn in something good. That is the standard everywhere outside a classroom.

Meanwhile, inside school, we are mostly using Chromebooks to do digital worksheets. A screen version of what we did with textbooks in the nineties.

I also do not think forcing every student to use AI is the answer. I put an opt-out clause in my syllabus. If a student refuses to use generative AI, fine. They get the same assignment held to the same standard with a different tool. I use this analogy: if I am teaching you to build a house with power tools and you object to electricity, grab a hammer and a hand saw. I still expect the house built to spec.

I have had three students in the last two semesters say they refuse to use AI. My answer is always the same. You can opt out and do the same work a different way. The standard does not drop. I am not going to shame anyone into adoption. But I am also not going to pretend the world outside school is waiting for them to catch up.

## The biggest blind spot is data

One of the dilemmas that keeps me up is how little people understand about what happens to their data inside these models.

People have an email mindset. They think data works like a message you accidentally sent to the wrong person. Just hit delete and it is gone. Large language models do not work that way.

Take a special educator writing an IEP, a very sensitive document with personally identifiable information everywhere. They go home, open ChatGPT on a personal device on the free version, paste the whole thing in. Their boss would never know. But that data is now training the model. You agreed to that when you signed up. And you cannot go to OpenAI headquarters, grab a server, and unplug your information.

A lot of my students were using ChatGPT in a phone browser, not logged in, no app. I told them I understand why. It is low friction. But they have the least privacy protection possible and zero control over their data. Names, dates, and their own ideas go in with no way to pull them back out.

Schools that teach AI literacy but skip data literacy are setting kids up to get burned.

## Scaling AI in schools is a leadership job

I did not start by asking my school for a microphone or a training slot. I just put my ideas out on LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube. Everywhere except inside my own building. I wanted to see what stuck and whether I had any idea what I was talking about.

Instead of targeting my colleagues, I let the work speak for itself. Eventually they came to me. Could you do some training? Could you present at a staff meeting? Sure.

Most schools already have what a friend of mine calls AI scouts. They already went through the messy part, hit the dead ends, and figured out which objections are real and which ones are just fear wearing a nicer outfit.

If you are a school leader, that is your shortcut. Let your scouts absorb the trial and error, then put them in front of everyone who is three or five or ten steps behind. For every objection a resistant staff member raises, take that list to your scouts. They will know the answer.

Then you have to have the courage to say this is how it is going to be.

Scaling AI in schools is barely a technology problem. It takes someone willing to have the hard conversation and tell people that ignoring this is not an option here.

## You do not need all the answers

You just have to be willing to examine your practice honestly and admit there might be a better way.

The thing that connects all the AI scouts I have met, Andy included, is they can look back at how they taught two years ago and say that is not the best way anymore. We live in different countries and teach different subjects, some of us in different languages. But the through line is the same: we looked at what we know now and admitted we needed to change how we work.

If you can get past the ego hit, the path gets simpler. Most of the information is free. The harder part is finding people who have already done the reps and being willing to say, hey, maybe there is a better way to do this.

### Where to find Andy Lucchesi and Skilling Future

- [Skilling Future Podcast episode](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JoZXbV-w8Bo)
- [Skilling Future website](https://skillingfutureai.com/)
- [Skilling Future on LinkedIn](https://pk.linkedin.com/company/skilliing-future)
- [Andy on LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/andys-everyday-english/)
- [Andy on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/andys.everyday.english/)

## Related pages

- [All AI notes](/blog)
- [Tools](/tools)
- [About Aaron](/about)

## Sources and references

- [Descript](https://www.descript.com/)
- [Perplexity](https://www.perplexity.ai/)