Picture this: It’s 7:30 PM on a Sunday.

My “school bag” (which is actually just a tote bag bursting at the seams) is staring at me from the corner of the living room. I have three unfinished lesson plans for the week, a stack of exit tickets I promised I’d grade “over the weekend,” and a half-written blog post draft that I haven’t touched in three weeks because, quite frankly, my brain feels like scrambled eggs.

They tell you the first year of teaching is hard. They tell you about the “Sunday Scaries.” But they don’t tell you about the math problem that defines your life: There are 24 hours in a day, and teaching requires about 26 of them.

For the first few months, I drowned. I was choosing between being a prepared teacher, a consistent blogger, or a functioning human being. I usually picked the first one, and the other two fell apart.

Then, I stopped treating Artificial Intelligence like the enemy or a cheating tool for students, and I started treating it like the teaching assistant my district couldn’t afford to hire me.

The result? I’m actually watching Netflix tonight.

In this post, I’m going to pull back the curtain on how I’m using tools like ChatGPT and Claude to survive my first year. We aren’t talking about replacing the teacher; we’re talking about automating the exhaustion. I’ll share how I use AI to cut my lesson planning time in half, and—perhaps most importantly—how I use it to keep this blog running even when I’m running on empty.

(Spoiler alert: I dictated the outline for this post into my phone while driving home on Friday, and AI organized it for me. Welcome to the future.)

All of the above was written by Google Gemini (including the title). I am going to be abundantly clear: I absolutely value critical thinking and reasoning skills and I’m afraid of what AI is doing to those skills.

At the same time, I’m an idiot if I don’t recognize that AI offers us a chance to streamline tasks we don’t have time for.

Last weekend I attended a professional development that reminded us that those who are going to have job security in the future are those who recognize and adapt to using AI as a tool now.

And I hate to admit it, but I agree.

While I won’t promise that every post here is not partially using AI, I do want to be up front about it. A lot of the posts will be my ideas but my “assistant” will be helping me to draft it, just like I use AI to help me draft lesson plans as needed to gain some time back in my work days.

Trust me, I get the concerns, but I do think that AI is a tool that will help us if it is treated like a valued research assistant and less like a replacement.

So sound out in the comments, how has AI helped you survive the busy world that is teaching?

(Once I’m surviving the school year, I might have some time to put together a post that highlights some of those tools and ideas. But until then, there’s a reason why this blog has been quieter than I meant it to be.)