My husband is a data scientist, so I’ve been hearing about AI and ChatGPT a lot over the past year. When I listened to him share his experiences using this generative AI tool, I—like many other educators—wasn’t sure how we should be using it. Educator and researcher Donna Shrum was encouraged to try out AI in her teaching practice by her colleagues. She wrote about her positive experience using it to give immediate feedback during a writing workshop in an opinion piece in Education Week (Ferlazzo, 2025).

Anyone who has lived with or interacted with teenagers for more than five minutes has likely heard them decry the injustice of one situation or another. Sometimes, their perspective is self-centered: “It’s not fair that I should have to do all of this homework.” Other times, they are making sense of the world around them, forming opinions on climate change, redlining, gerrymandering, or the school-to-prison pipeline. If you have had the privilege of spending time in math classrooms with teenagers, you’ve also probably heard them question the utility of their academic work, especially their math work. “When will I ever use this in my life?”