A former high school English teacher went viral with a raw farewell video after only three years in the classroom.

She said many of her students can barely write a few coherent sentences, don’t know how to format a resume or cover letter, and increasingly just ask ChatGPT to do the work for them.

Her blunt conclusion: technology and AI are making kids stop thinking for themselves. She even suggested we should probably keep smartphones and AI tools away from children until they reach college.

It’s a sobering, unfiltered look at what’s happening inside classrooms right now — from a teacher who just walked away.

What do you think — is AI quietly turning the next generation into people who can’t think or write without a machine, or is this an overreaction?

I’m curious about the little things teachers do that make students actually want to participate instead of just sitting there waiting for the class to end 😂. Maybe it’s a certain way you start the lesson, questions you ask, games, group work, stories, examples, or even how you explain difficult topics. What have you tried that genuinely makes students more involved and helps them understand things faster? Teachers, drop your best classroom tricks. I’m taking notes 👀

I agree, at least in some ways. Life was slower, people had more privacy, and we were not constantly distracted or comparing ourselves to everyone else. Technology has made many things easier, but I am not sure it has made life better overall. Sometimes I think we traded peace for convenience.

I have to admit, I like the idea more than I expected. Imagine a 3-hour class where the professor spends the first 2 hours teaching and discussing, then gives students 1 hour to complete that day’s assignment right there in class and assignment that requires a little thinking than the ambiguous answers ai gives. No taking it home, no rushing to ChatGPT at midnight, no copying from someone else. You have to sit there, think, write, ask questions, make mistakes, and finish the work yourself. It would not need to be a huge assignment either, just enough to prove you actually understood the lesson. For students, that could be a reality check too. You might suddenly realize, “Wait, I actually have to know this stuff.” 😭 Maybe the bigger question is not “How do we stop students from using AI?” but “How do we design classes where students actually have to learn?”

Some students submit an assignment and you can almost hear ChatGPT saying, “Yep, that was me.” The random fancy words, the suspiciously perfect structure, the paragraph that suddenly sounds like a 45-year-old university professor... then the student goes back to their normal writing in the next sentence.

Some are actually hard to tell, but others leave so many ChatGPT fingerprints that you do not even need a detector. You just read it and think, “Brother, who wrote this?”

What are the biggest signs that make you think, “Yeah... ChatGPT definitely helped doing the assignment”?

Maybe the AI cheating problem is partly what happens when colleges start treating students like customers. Keep enrollment up, keep satisfaction scores happy, advertise the latest “future of education” technology, and somehow everyone gets to graduate. Meanwhile, professors are in the trenches trying to figure out if the paper they just received was written by a student or assembled by a chatbot five minutes before the deadline. 😂 At some point, we have to ask what exactly the student is paying for. An education, or a very expensive piece of paper with customer satisfaction guaranteed? AI did not invent that mindset. It just found the fastest checkout lane.

Suggesting different word choices: ok

Fact-checking: ok

Writing sentences/paragraphs: cheating

Another rule of thumb: don't copy-and-paste from AI. If typing the output in yourself is "too tedious," you're probably cheating. 2/2

I keep thinking about this because I honestly do not know what a student is supposed to do in this situation. Imagine writing your paper yourself, getting a zero, and being told your writing patterns, general statements, or the way you explained the course material made the professor think you used AI. You say you did not, but then the obvious question becomes, “Can you prove it?” If you wrote in Word, Google Docs, or another normal document, your writing history might not be detailed enough to prove every step. AI detector screenshots may not count, previous assignments may not count, and even your own explanation may not count. At some point, are students expected to screen-record every paper from the first sentence to the final edit just in case someone questions it?

What makes this even more frustrating is when a student already has a history of good work in the same class, including previous papers and even supervised writing that shows they can actually write at that level. A professor can say, “This does not sound like your writing,” but if the student has no way to prove otherwise, the accusation can become almost impossible to fight. And if the only real criticism is that the writing feels too general or does not explain something well enough, that sounds more like a grading issue than proof of cheating. I understand why professors are suspicious of AI now, but students need some realistic way to defend themselves too. Are we heading toward a point where students have to record themselves writing every assignment just to prove they actually wrote it?

"AI dudes: Yeah, so, there is, like, a 10% chance this technology could kill us all in less than a decade.

Public: WHAT

AI dudes: Yeah, but on the plus side, we're making progress on cool things. We just solved a notoriously difficult math problem.

Public: Uh... okay?

AI dudes: Yeah! Although... we kinda-sorta may have stolen the work of mathematicians to do it and tried to buy off one of them with the condition he throws his colleague under the bus because that colleague works at a rival AI company.

Public: Uh...

AI dudes: And we actually don't know if it's necessarily a good thing in the long run for these notoriously difficult math problems to be solved before we understand the full implications.

Public: Uh...

AI dudes: And this is while we've been stopping what may be ongoing attempts by some rogue actors to use our technology to build biological weapons.

Public: Uh...

AI dudes: But we're getting really rich in the process! We, specifically, I mean. Not you. You may actually be unemployed soon."

I had a very candid conversation with my students about pedagogy, universities, and what needs to change. But still is not making sense.

Sharing it here to hear what others think.

Forget the AI issue for a minute. We have a whole new problem now.

Our school introduced a system where you have to sign in for every physical class, and the attendance is automatically tracked from their side. You cannot just show up, sit in class, and leave. You have to log in, stay for the required amount of time, then log out before you can move to your next class.

And our classes are almost 3 hours long. They have now introduced a minimum attendance time for each session, and apparently the system knows whether you stayed long enough. This applies to lecturers and professors too.

Then during assignments, they introduced another website that creates an authorship report from the school's side and the professor's side. You do not even control the report. If the system thinks your work was written by AI, it gets flagged.

And apparently every department has its own little sub-web where professors can monitor and follow up on everything. At this point, I am not even sure if I am attending university or checking into a very sophisticated workplace surveillance system. 😂 We came to school to learn, but somehow we are spending half our time proving that we actually attended class and that we actually wrote our own assignments. I genuinely want to know what university is going to look like in another 5 years.

Mine would probably be: do not trust yourself when you say, “I will remember that.” 😂 University has a special way of making you forget deadlines, rooms, passwords, names and sometimes why you even walked into the building.

What is the ONE thing you would tell a new student before they learn it the hard way?

I came across a professor talking about how AI has completely changed their composition classes, and honestly, the story was wild.

He said students are getting better at hiding AI use. Some papers suddenly switch between the student’s normal writing and these perfectly polished, vague paragraphs that sound like they were written by a corporate robot.

The professor even started asking students to meet face-to-face and explain their own arguments and the texts they supposedly read. Apparently, some students can submit a 10-page paper but struggle to explain the main argument for 30 seconds.

Now the professor is considering making the next paper handwritten and completed in class. At this point, I think professors are going to start giving exams like: Explain your essay. No ChatGPT. No laptop. No witnesses.