As both a working artist and a public high school English teacher, I stand at a peculiar intersection of tradition and innovation, structure and freedom, guidance and autonomy. Recently, my work as both a quilting artist and a public educator has given me critical reasons to think more deeply about these seeming contradictions. Two specific and recent occasions urge me to work on reconciling them: the misuse of AI in my high school English classroom and the creation of my rolodex of miniquilts for SAQA’s Breaking Boundaries Virtual Gallery. Both expand the things I treasure, and both require me to think more deeply about what I’m doing.
As ever, my studio work and my teaching practice exist in ongoing dialogue. In early mornings and late nights, as I worked on my small contribution to expanding the understanding of what an art quilt can be, I was also moving in and out of faculty meetings and long evening conversations with teacher friends. In those spaces, teachers bemoaned the cheating unfolding in classrooms as students submitted work copied and pasted from AI programs.
It is not difficult to understand why teachers are frazzled by the volume of copying and pasting. A teacher assigns a prompt. Many students copy the prompt directly into an AI program and then paste the generated response straight into the submission box—often without engaging with the text at all, sometimes without even skimming it to grasp what the exercise was meant to teach. Understandably, this exasperates teachers. Many decry it as cheating, and arguably, they are right. Just as no one learns quilting by skipping straight to the finished piece, students cannot learn thinking, judgment, or voice by bypassing the personal and challenging process—even if the finished product looks acceptable. But to many of our students, copying and pasting a finished product from AI is a perfectly sensible decision, especially for a still- developing human brain.
If I were sixteen, with a half-baked frontal cortex, an emerging emotional repertoire, and still in the lower ranges of Kohlberg’s scale of moral development, copying and pasting from AI would seem not only reasonable but efficient. From a student’s perspective, it is simply the most logical way to fulfill the assignment. This makes sense when we remember that adolescents are working with an underdeveloped prefrontal cortex—the part of the brain responsible for impulse control, planning, foresight, and weighing consequences. This copy-and-paste propensity is not a defect, nor should it be treated as such. It is a developmental stage that can make students appear inconsistent, highly susceptible to peer influence, and driven by immediate rewards such as relief and approval. My friends do it. If I just copy and paste it, it’s done, and it has the qualities my teacher wants. My teacher will think it’s a good essay. Everything is grammatical. Everything is correct. If you are fifteen, this is an efficient and rational way to handle a five-paragraph essay. But understanding this about our students is not enough. We need solutions and new strategies for managing it.
Historically, public education has relied on students accumulating a shared body of facts, skills, and ideologies. Information was slower and harder to access as we flipped through card catalogs and encyclopedias. That has obviously shifted with the internet and AI, and yet public education is still operating on many outdated models—often asking students to know and recall information that is now available at the touch of a button, rather than on 3×5 cards painstakingly handwritten and memorized from articles found at the library.
We need to rethink what public education should be; we must engage in an honest dialogue about what it should look like in a fundamentally different world. Just as quilt patterns designed for scraps of the past do not always suit modern fabrics or intentions, educational models built for information scarcity do not necessarily hold in an age of abundance. I was fortunate to have a tech-savvy colleague who warned me what was coming when ChatGPT first caught educators off guard. Even so, I failed to prepare the necessary tools or fully grasp the scope of what would follow until it was too late. Now we are working backward. In quilting terms, teachers are not starting from raw fabric; they are reworking partially finished pieces under time pressure, trying to preserve what still has value. As a result, instead of teaching students how to use these tools thoughtfully and ethically to support their learning, many teachers feel trapped in a cycle of remediation—attempting to undo habits already established.
In general, we know that no significant problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it. In the era of AI, we must therefore rethink the purpose and structure of public education itself. At the classroom level, we need to hold students to standards that elevate them while respecting their neurological realities—applying a gentler version of Hanlon’s Razor and resisting the impulse to label every infraction as “plagiarism” when “a still-developing prefrontal cortex and moral framework” offers a sufficient explanation. At the community level, we must stop treating knowledge as the final destination and begin to see it instead as fuel—propellant toward a more expansive and imaginative future.
Both the art quilt and public education in the age of AI represent expansions of things we deeply value. As a teacher and a quilter, both invite me to slow down, reconsider my assumptions, and think more carefully about what I am truly trying to make—out of fabric and out of my classroom. In order to retain authenticity, we can use this moment to resist what is arguably the fastest route to completion, in favor of processes that teach us how to live with complexity and tolerate the discomfort of figuring things out on our own.
