Teachomatic what to automate, and what not to

When a Student Should Not Use It

Lists of banned tasks do not survive contact with a real week. They are too long to remember, they date immediately, and a student facing an unlisted situation at eleven at night has nothing to reason with.

What works is a rule they can apply themselves, plus a short list of the situations where the cost is highest.

For a workplace-oriented comparison outside education, further details offers another way to look at measurement, workload, behaviour, or accountability.

The rule

If the difficulty is the point, doing it for you removes the point.

That is it. Everything below is an application.

For an external perspective on student digital literacy, privacy, and learning, see FutureLearn.

Students can apply this if you teach it as a question: what is this task trying to make me able to do? If the answer is "produce this artefact," assistance is a means. If the answer is "become able to do this," assistance is a substitute.

An eleven-year-old can work with that. It is the same reason you do not get fitter watching someone else run, which is the analogy that lands fastest.

The four expensive situations

Practice. The task exists to build fluency by repetition — arithmetic, conjugation, spelling, the mechanics of a method. There is no version of outsourcing this that leaves the value intact. This is the clearest case and the one students most often get wrong, because practice tasks look trivial and therefore look like exactly the thing to speed up.

Foundations they will build on. Anything they will need automatically later. Skipping the construction of paragraphs at thirteen shows up at seventeen, and by then it is expensive to fix. The younger the student, the more of their work falls into this category.

Anything they will be assessed on without it. A blunt, practical argument that carries more weight with older students than any appeal to learning. If the exam is closed-book and unassisted, every hour of assisted practice is an hour of practising the wrong task.

When they do not know enough to check. Using it in an area where they cannot evaluate the answer means accepting whatever comes back. Checking is the skill that makes everything else safe, and where they cannot check, they are not using a tool, they are trusting a stranger.

Where it is fine, and worth saying so

A rule about when not to only works if the permitted space is real and generous. Otherwise students conclude the honest answer is "never," decide that is unreasonable, and stop listening to all of it.

Getting unstuck. Having something explained a fourth way. Generating practice questions. Checking their own understanding after they have attempted something. Translating a term. Talking through a plan before writing. Feedback on a draft they wrote themselves.

Notice what most of those have in common: the student has already done the thinking, or is using it to do more of the thinking. That is the pattern to name.

The hardest case: when they are stuck and it is late

Worth addressing directly, because it is the actual situation.

A student who is genuinely stuck at eleven at night, with something due, has a bad set of options. Telling them the pure answer — struggle productively — is advice from someone who is not in that position.

Give them a better third option. Use it to get unstuck on the specific point, then do the rest yourself, and tell me you did that. That is honest, it preserves most of the value, and it is what a capable adult does.

And make sure the alternative exists: if you are stuck, message me / come at break / hand in what you have with a note. A student who believes handing in partial work is unacceptable will always choose the shortcut. Making that route safe is the single most useful thing a policy does.

What not to say

"It will make you stupid." Overclaims what is known — the long-term evidence is genuinely thin — and students who spot the exaggeration discount everything else you said.

"You won't have it in the real world." They will. This one is simply false and they know it.

"It's cheating." Sometimes true, usually not, and using it as a blanket term collapses the distinction you are trying to teach.

The accurate version is narrower and more persuasive: for some tasks, using it means you do not get the thing the task was for. That claim is defensible, specific, and it survives a fifteen-year-old testing it.

The short version