Katharyn Havens helped her 7th-grade son write an essay on dopamine and phone addiction by letting him explore YouTube videos, build a mind map, and use ChatGPT to ask probing questions about his draft. He finished in an hour after a day of sports, with AI augmenting his thinking rather than replacing it.
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Real talk. Today I was helping my son to work on an essay. This is something he struggled with a little bit. He's in 7th-ish grade, and I really want him to become a better writer. And I found that just trying to give him essays, assignments that he needs to write as you would in school, doesn't spark the creativity and the interest that I want from for him and from him, I want him to know that writing is amazing and it's a great skill. So rather than force him to do that, we looked at a bunch of things that he was interested in through YouTube videos. He figured out that he thought it would be cool to know why do people get addicted to things and how does this whole scrolling on the phones and what is this doom scrolling— that was the topic of discussion. And what happened after that, he then watched 3, 4 videos, made a mind map, then started to write in his notebook, then he shares it with me. I refine it. I'm trying to help him with spelling a little bit at a time. Again, not to go through with a giant red pen and cross up his whole paper, but to little by little help him correct it. Because he needs to redo it until it's a great assignment to turn in. And I want to see what I call the finished product, right? I, I'm helping him along the way, but he knows his goal is the finished product. Now he's teaching me about dopamine and oxytocin and what's happening with addiction. Just now at the table, he was using ChatGPT, and I have schooled all of them to use ChatGPT as an assistant, not as the doer of the task. So he has talked to ChatGPT and said, "I'm this age, I'm working on this project, here's what I'm writing about," and he's keeping it in his same tone, at his same level, and ChatGPT is giving a little bit of advice And then we said, hey, Chat, this is what I understand. Tell me 3 questions or 3 comments that would help me to see this better or in a different way. And now he's refined his whole essay on dopamine and addiction and is going to finish it up probably in the next hour. So I'm here to tell you that using AI is not only essential, but not difficult. I mean, we're all kind of learning it at the same time, but when we teach them the responsible use of technology, that it's not meant to do the work for you but to help you have new ideas, it's really going to be an amazing future. And you're helping them be ready for the future that has so little to do with what we see right now. They need to be ready for AI and use it responsibly, and as if it's just another part of their life. So that's it for this one. See you in the next video. Okay, part 2 update. While I was up here filming video 1, he was down there actually finishing that assignment. He finished the whole essay using a little bit of ChatGPT But still, through his own writing, I can see his whole process. And he feels so accomplished. I mean, I can't even believe it. And it's now 5:24 on a Friday night. He had chosen to play some sports games today, which is amazing, right? Fully sanctioned that. But I said, okay, so if we're gonna do sports for most of the day, that means our learning time will be a little bit later. Are you okay with that? Yeah, Mom, sure. And I was up here filming. He finished it.
