To advise young people not to go into teaching?

[Dappy777]

I have two nice, intelligent young people in my life who are considering careers in teaching. One wants to be a languages teacher (German and Spanish), the other wants to teach English as a foreign language. I don't know what advice to give them. Both are worried about AI and don't want to invest time and money only to be replaced by an advanced AI system.

I have taught English as a foreign language online, and one of my students uses an AI system to help him. His language skills have come on in leaps and bounds, to the point where I wonder why he bothers booking lessons with me at all. If AI is that good now, what will it be like in a year, let alone in five?

Oh calm down. I don’t think you should be giving out careers advice telling people to not be a teacher when you only qualified a fee
months ago and have been worried about AI from the outset

I'm not a teacher but have worked in secondary school support roles for 10 years. To be brutally honest the vast majority of kids hate MFL lessons and sadly now we're out of Europe I imagine that will get worse.

TEFL is great for giving opportunities to travel which could be a massive positive.

I don't think you're being entirely unreasonable but I'd encourage them to see all the pros and cons rather than discourage them completely, and think about what their back up plans might be if they changed their minds or it didn't work out.

Oh it absolutely is! I had the urge to teach in UK schools, and I love it ❤️