Last year, Jessica Gutierrez’s chemistry students tested the ocean. They were studying acids and bases, so she brought in seawater and soil she’d gathered from Marine Park and Palisades Park with a gardener’s test kit from the hardware store — her own boys came along for the digging. Then her students at Santa Monica High School did something a chemistry class couldn’t have done a few years ago: they fed their data to Gemini and drafted proposals to the city of Santa Monica.
One group came back with a plan involving budgets and land acquisition — “a gazillion dollars,” she laughs, “very idealistic.” But something real happened in the exercise. “It opened their eyes a little more, especially some of our kids who aren’t as plugged in to local politics.”
That is one face of AI in Gutierrez’s classroom, and there are others. Eighteen years into teaching, she runs five sections — three honors chemistry, two collaborative special-education physics — and the spread between what works for one student and what works for another is the daily problem of her profession. “What works for one kid doesn’t work for another,” she says. Scanning her roster before the first bell of her eighteenth year, she noticed a student who is hearing impaired and asked Gemini what to do about a lab full of noise and no microphone. The answer came back simple: write down the things you would normally say. A student with an IEP, a student still learning English — she runs them all through the same practice: take the thing she built, and ask the machine to help her bend it toward the kid in front of her.
Which is what makes her next move so interesting. When the pandemic pushed her classroom online, Gutierrez rebuilt her beloved “interactive science notebooks” — part reference binder, part workbook, part diary of learning — in Google Slides, and kept building for five, six years. Tabbed, color-coded, meticulous: warmups, graphing, acceleration, displacement, review. This year, she’s pulling those digital notebooks out of her classroom and putting paper back in her students’ hands — on her own dime, mostly. “We have Chromebooks for every kid. They’re free, district pays,” she says. “If I want notebooks for my students, I got to buy them. And I want kids to write.” There’s a grant application in the works to help, and she is the first to name the punchline: “What’s really ironic is AI helped me write that.”
The reason is what she watches screens do to teenagers. “Kids are kids and they’re distracted,” she says. Even with monitoring software running, a Chromebook is a portal — a chat window, a game, a Pokémon match — sitting one keystroke behind the lab notes. Reading Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation, as both a teacher and a mother, sharpened what she was already seeing in the post-pandemic classroom. “Kids are less independent than they used to be. When I started teaching, I could say, read this, and that wasn’t even a second thought. Now if I give kids more than a page, I’m like, okay, here’s a graphic organizer.”
If she sounds like she’s on both sides of the argument, notice that nearly everyone around her has picked one. She sits on her school’s AI task force, where she counts three debates running at once — whether to let AI into classrooms at all, whether kids are on screens too much regardless, and what any of it means for the world the students are walking into. The room is divided; some members joined specifically to keep AI out. Her district held a meeting this week where the presentation slides included AI-generated illustrations, and colleagues were furious — that’s what our district is spending money on; you’re ruining our brains. A new colleague in the English department greeted the technology with a flat verdict: all kids cheat with it.
“I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.”
Gutierrez’s camp is quieter and more honest about what it doesn’t know. “This is not going anywhere,” she says, “so we need to figure something out.” The laundry line — a quote she found online and adopted as her compass — is how she draws the boundary: the machine earns its place when it clears the way for the human work. In her classroom that means teaching prompt engineering as a discipline. “You can’t just be like, write this paper for me,” she tells students. “It’s: I got an 80 on this test and I want an A on my final. What do I need to study?”
The same instinct runs at home. Her husband, Oscar, works in tech — they planned their wedding in Google Sheets — but she’ll tell you, “not to flex,” that she picked up AI before he did. As a mother of two boys, she’s used it the way she uses it for lesson planning: to sort the conflicting advice that comes at every parent — the pediatrician says one thing, the therapist another, the grandparents a third — into something she can actually act on.
What she will not claim, after eighteen years and a front-row seat to every wave of classroom technology, is certainty. “I never know if what I’m doing is right or wrong, or if I’m cheating,” she says — some in her profession would call the way she plans lessons exactly that. “But I’m also like: it’s here.” Nobody has the answer — not the district, not the task force, not the parents. What Gutierrez has instead is a direction. Asked to place herself on the spectrum between fear and hope, she doesn’t hesitate.
“I’m probably a centrist going towards the hope side.”
Her advice to other teachers is the advice of someone who has stopped waiting for the argument to settle: “Be open. See how it fits you and your philosophy. Don’t say tech needs to go, AI needs to go — it’s finding the balance that works for you and your students.”
On the first day of school, her chemistry students will make a rainbow in test tubes — “it’s not scientific at all, it’s just literally getting kids to move” — and thirty-some teenagers she hasn’t met yet will file in under a whiteboard where a student’s hand-drawn bubble letters already spell out welcome back to school. The Chromebooks will be there. So will the paper notebooks she’s fighting for — six years of digital craft headed back onto pages a distracted kid can’t click away from.
The machine does her laundry. The kids get to write. And the teacher in the middle of the loudest argument in American education keeps moving, deliberately, toward hope.