Is AI actually making students worse at sitting with confusion?

Something keeps coming up in conversations about learning and I'm curious if others are seeing it too. When students hit a hard problem now, the instinct is to immediately ask an AI rather than just stewing in the discomfort for a while before figuring it out yourself. That struggle period, even when it feels unproductive, is where a lot of real learning happens. The frustration is kind of the point.

It's not that AI tools are bad in every context. But there's a difference between using one to check your thinking versus using one to skip the part where you have to think at all. A lot of students seem to be landing firmly in the second camp, and it's hard to blame them when the tool is right there.

What bothers me more is that this might be eroding something harder to measure than test scores. The ability to tolerate not knowing something for a few hours and keep working anyway. That capacity matters a lot beyond school.

Curious whether teachers or students here have noticed this shift, and whether anyone has found a way to actually address it in a classroom setting without just banning devices entirely.

Submitted July 10, 2026 at 01:51PM by WickedKing94 https://ift.tt/cUBjEAp