Could teachers be replaced with robots?

[noblegiraffe]

This is increasingly being suggested as a solution to the critical lack of teachers, particularly at secondary school.

My general position is that we saw how pupils are not motivated to learn when left to their own devices at home over lockdown. As a teacher, a lot of my day is spent getting kids to do the work, in various ways.

This blog by Becky Allen "Will students feel motivated to work for the AI-masters?' is an interesting discussion of the issue. It refers to Animal Crossing making you feel guilty for neglecting your characters, the Duolingo owl encouraging you to keep a streak and so on. Personally, I find closing the rings on my Apple Watch the only thing that has motivated me to do regular exercise.

But what these things all have in common is that they are things that the student has opted into in the first place. Presumably there was some initial motivation on their part that just needs a nudge to keep going.

An important part of teaching is building relationships with the pupils on a human level. Can a student build a relationship with an AI? Well, definitely. But on a widespread enough scale for it to be more effective than humans interaction? Not sure.

However, would it be better than no teacher? Most likely.

https://rebeccaallen.co.uk/2024/01/13/artificial-incentives-will-students-feel-motivated-to-work-for-their-ai-masters/

We need schools for far more than learning content, they socialise children. You only have to look at accounts of what happened after the COVID pandemic, the behaviour issues that are still working their way through schools, to see this.

Yet at the same time, there are large numbers of pupils for whom lockdowns worked really well, i.e. those who were being bullied at school etc!

I don't think AI will "replace" teachers, but done properly, it could help massively, especially for those for whom the current comp system of "one size fits all" really doesn't work.

Let it come and replace me. It's welcome to it. I've spent 30 years dealing with teenage angst and aggressive behaviour. Let them bring in a bloody robot to deal with it all.

TBH it would be interesting to see which happens first

AI robots becoming sentient taking over the world and people blaming teachers for it.
Or
AI robots becoming sentient and going on strike against the government for cruel and poor working conditions.
Or becoming sentient and having a nervous breakdown.

Agree with this. I'm studying at the moment, the material is all online - powerpoint and pdfs. I have to write it all up in notebooks so I can read from the notebooks as I just don't take it in properly reading from the screen. Another person in my class just prints everything off and reads from the printed out slides.

Teachers can't be replaced with robots, though hopefully AI can assist with some aspects of teaching. But actual human teachers are needed to engage with students, get them to pay attention and interested in the subject. And no way will robots get an unwilling teenager to do anything (unless its RoboCop)

I know 3 people who trained to become teachers but decided to change careers due to the fact that they get paid so little with zero appreciation one witnessed the teacher get threatened he would stab him. This solution though people think is inpractictal is neccessary as unfortunately a non trivial amount of children these days are brought up without basic morals or respect. I hate to say it but it’s obvious the rise in single motherhood is responsible for this it’s a trend that is happening across the developed world. They don’t have time as there is one parent to enforce proper discipline and frankly the authority to make them listen. I’m not going to get into the ins and outs about who’s fault it is there are so many single mother households but there is a reason statistically over 80% of people in prison come from single parent homes. The point being I wouldn’t act suprised this is being offered as a solution because increasingly the alternative is no education at all except private, turns out people aren’t willing to teach ungrateful brats and get spat and shouted at go figure.

I’m not going to get into the ins and outs about who’s fault it is there are so many single mother households but there is a reason statistically over 80% of people in prison come from single parent homes.

97% of the prison population have experienced significant childhood trauma, but let’s blame single parents shall we.

im Blaming single motherhood not single mothers if that makes sense. Whatever reason people end up in single mother homes it still is a detriment to outcomes in life for those children. Anecdotally aswell I never experienced kids getting in serious trouble with a healthy fear of their father’s wrath. It’s a sad reality that proper discipline is mostly enforced by male figures and this shapes especially men very deeply in their lives and once boys are teenagers and hormones start going crazy it’s easy to lose control if it’s just 1 parent hence issues in schools. The sanctity of the nuclear family has eroded but there is a reason why this was the standard for 99.99% of human history.

I hate to say it but it’s obvious the rise in single motherhood is responsible for this it’s a trend that is happening across the developed world.

So you think that women staying in violent relationship, or emotionally abusive ones or again where one if the parents is cheating is a better environment for children to grow up. There is no risk of trauma for the child, nor are they learning, fur example, that violence is ok.
Thats a really strange way of looking at things imo.

Or maybe you believe that children need a father to keep them in line? Never mind that said fathers weren’t that involved in raising the children in the first place anyway.

Or maybe you mean we should go back to fathers using the slipper or the belt? So avoiding single mothers would allow for a strong parent, a father, properly disciplining the child.

If all of this was true, I notice though that, at no point, you mention the fact fathers nowdays do not fight that hard to have their dc50/50, let alone full time. It’s a shame because, according to your theory of women being too weak to discipline their dcs and raise them properly, they should be able to do that much better right?

fwiw you need to learn about statistics.
80% of people in jail coming from single parent household doesn’t mean that 80% of children in single parent household will have no idea what discipline is or will make teachers life hell.
Nor does it mean you can take those numbers in isolation and make any conclusion out of it. You need to learn about co funding factors. Such as income (most single mothers are living in poverty thanks to our very patriarcal system, no affordable childcare options etc…), trauma and having experienced violence etc etc etc
But yes let’s be simplistic instead and blame single mothers. Not fathers who are equally responsible of their child upbringing. Or the many other reasons why schools are getting harder and harder place to spend time in (for both teachers and pupils imo)

Xpost @Mambo1986

So I was right. You want to bring back the slipper and the belt as away to discipline children.

Right…..

Anecdotally aswell I never experienced kids getting in serious trouble with a healthy fear of their father’s wrath

As a social worker many of the kids I worked with had a “healthy fear” of being assaulted by their parents. By healthy fear I mean utterly terrified, taking them away from home out into the community, vulnerable to gangs and more violence where they did indeed end up in prison. They weren’t a problem in school because they were never at school.

The nuclear family was prevalent for so long because of societal shame which left women in abusive relationships for much of their lives - I don’t think that’s a good thing for anyone.

Hey, this thread is about replacing teachers with robots not bashing single mothers, please can you ignore the derailment?

There's a Wolfram Alpha plugin for ChatGPT that makes it very far from crap at maths. Most people's experience of ChatGPT is just the freebie version, which is quite limited. If you pay for it, and get some of the plugins which allows it to use external sources of data and expertise in real time, then it opens up a whole new world.

And that quite happily brings us to funding.
The government currently refuses to fully fund schools, do posters really think that they will pay for all the add ons that would be required to make this work?
Remembering that anything with education in the title makes it much more expensive.
unless their mates own the company then they will throw shed loads of cash at it for a product that doesn't work

As a teacher, I'd say at least half my job if not more was either emotional or intuitive. Building relationships, working out how to motivate kids who need it, offering support to those with additional needs. Offering pastoral care for children dealing with problems outside their academics (grief, divorce, friendship troubles, other worries). Dealing with questions and complaints from parents. Engaging pupils' interest through adapting teaching and having good rapport. Heck, even just getting a child to clearly explain which part of a problem they're stuck on is sometimes impossible for a human never mind a machine.

If you think that all teaching involves is reading out a prepared presentation and marking work with clear correct answers (eg maths or science) - yes a robot could do that. But if you think that then you don't understand teaching at all.

A robot couldn't read the room and adapt a lesson to engage the children or think of an alternate way of explaining things if they're not understanding. It can't understand individual children to know what engages them or embarrasses them. It couldn't mark a creative writing piece or artwork and give those subtle human nuances that make it better.

Daisy Christodoulou has been looking into chatgpt doing marking and she says it's bad at it and getting worse with each update!

https://x.com/daisychristo/status/1748404298289930510?s=61&t=U9XrcF693-JpMxeIueYG7g

One of the major awarding bodies is looking into AI for assessment. It's a big project over a number of years because they need to see whether it can effectively replace human markers before they try.

I think we should teach children how to get the most out of AI, this will be a useful skill in the future. I think if it really improves, it could be at least a teaching aid but possibly much more. It could help under performing children by gamifying subjects (like Duolingo) to make the lessons more engaging for those whose parents can't afford a tutor.

As I mentioned upthread, gamifying something only works if the initial motivation to do something is there. So it will make you continue doing something so as not to break a streak, but you have to care about the streak!

That is where the teacher comes in to encourage them to engage with these tools, less time consuming than taking them every step of the way, especially if it is a class size of 30.

Actually, I think I'd rather teach from the front of the class than try to get them to learn something from a computer room lesson.

As I mentioned upthread, gamifying something only works if the initial motivation to do something is there. So it will make you continue doing something so as not to break a streak, but you have to care about the streak!

Intrinsic motivation is definitely better than extrinsic motivation. Being able to motivate yourself to do your school work even when you find it boring must be a massive predictor of success. But there's no doubt that gamifying helps get at least some learning into kids who otherwise aren't motivated. The kids at my school are obsessed with Blooket. Even the very switched-off ones get very into it. At the very least it drums some vocab or verb formations into them.

Looking at the Blooket website it's a way of reviewing content that has previously been taught rather than teaching the actual content? If it's about reinforcing memorising, then I guess it's like memorising facts in history versus learning how to write an essay.

I remember Marcus du Sautoy's effort to gameify maths with Manga High, that seems to have died a death. It was a fun way to help them practise stuff, but again didn't replace the actual teaching.

Yes, that's true, Blooket is for practice. I wonder how well Duolingo-style learning would work in school, for independent learning. Obviously if you're doing it as private individual, you need the motivation in the first place, like you said. But if you have to do it because it's school work, maybe a gamified system would motivate some kids more than a non-gamified one?

Its every governments' wet dream to offload teachers and not have to pay and pension them off.
It does seem like a lot of the general public want teachers gone too.
A lot of people are quite hostile to a free education - and education, schools and teachers in general.

I do think teacher will be removed from the classrooms eventually.
But look at what has happened to student attainment and behaviour during and after covid.