Ep #8: AI and Kids, What the Classroom Can Teach the Boardroom

Episode 8: AI and Kids, What the Classroom Can Teach the Boardroom School is back in session, and so is the debate. Adam and Chevelle open this one on back-to-school stress and end up somewhere bigger: New York City just put a one-year moratorium on AI in K-8 classrooms, affecting roughly 600,000 students, while a small district in Michigan quietly replaced a specials class with digital literacy. Two very different bets on the same question. Along the way, Adam and Chevelle get into cognitive atrophy versus cognitive foreclosure, why banning a tool never actually stops people from using it, and why every argument playing out in schools right now is the same argument playing out in boardrooms. What We Cover [00:01:00] Back to school, and the Copilot use case that saved an hour. Chevelle drops her kids' school calendar into Copilot and gets every date on her calendar in about 20 seconds. [00:02:30] New York City's K-8 AI moratorium. A one-year pause covering the largest school district in the country, with limits on teacher use too, announced days before the school year started. [00:04:30] The other side of the coin. Chevelle's district cut a long-running specials class and replaced it with digital literacy, starting in kindergarten. [00:07:00] Cognitive atrophy vs. cognitive foreclosure. The distinction that should be driving every AI policy conversation: losing a skill you already built vs. never building it at all. Chevelle applies both to org design. [00:09:00] "You won't have a calculator in your pocket." Adam on the technology warning every one of us got in school, and how well it aged. [00:10:30] AI's PR problem. The health teacher who assigned a deliberately strange writing prompt and got back 30 versions of the same Mission Impossible story arc. [00:12:00] The numbers on student adoption. 62% of students middle school and up reported using AI as of December 2025, up from roughly 48% six months earlier, and they're getting more skeptical, not less. [00:13:00] The leadership parallel. Adam asks the uncomfortable question: if credentialed executives are still hesitant to adopt AI, how are parents supposed to teach it? Chevelle's answer: you can't teach what you don't use. [00:17:30] Differentiation and the 30-kid classroom. Why a blanket yes or no misses the kids on both ends of the curve. [00:20:00] Shadow AI, the K-8 edition. The exact dynamic Modern Workery sees in organizations. Ban the tool and people don't stop, they just stop telling you, and they pick worse tools with fewer protections. [00:21:30] A real client story. Sensitive company data going into general-purpose models, and what that costs. [00:22:30] Cognitive scaffolding in practice. Learning through narrative, getting the model to challenge you, and the kid whose math problems all became soccer problems. [00:24:00] What Adam and Chevelle actually tell their own kids. Tool, not crutch. Question everything. Ask for the sources. [00:27:30] The take-home math quiz that broke the AI. Multiple choice, wrong answer, a hallway full of parents the next morning who got the same wrong answer. [00:29:00] Bringing it home. Why the lessons from a group of 10-year-olds transfer cleanly to a group of 40-year-olds, and why the kids are often the easier audience. Favorite Quotes "Just because we ban something doesn't mean that students aren't gonna use it. They're gonna use it, but probably hide it." — Chevelle "You can never teach something that you don't understand yourself." — Chevelle "You're not gonna have a calculator in your pocket throughout life. Well, guess what? We do." — Adam "Use it as a scaffold, as a tool to get you to the answer, not to get you the answer." — Chevelle "Most times it's easier to teach the children than it is to teach adults, because they don't have years and years of programming." — Adam