Having been a teacher for nearly three years I can think of plenty of times that the thought of standing in front of thirty -‘odd’ students causes a certain amount of bile to back-up in my mouth.
The students don’t often listen and if they do listen they regularly haven’t got the faintest idea on what I’m harping on about!
This, according to The Telegraph.co.uk and the Korean Times could all change. In Japan they have succeeded in having the first robot teacher actually teach a class. Apparently South Korea, not wanting to be out done by it’s neighbour across the water wants to introduce C3PO to the elementary school system. Apparently within the next ten years they plan to eradicate all foreigners who are teaching in Korea.
I honestly can’t make up my mind about this, partially because most teachers work like robots in the classroom so there wouldn’t be much of a difference really. And there won’t be any complaining from tem about working a few extra hours to mark the pathetic work the students do, which quite frankly is what sends me to sleep, but what about human contact? This is probably the most important thing young children get from adults – how to be an adult, how to be loving, caring and how to joke! I’m not worried about being replaced by a robot because it might get me off my backside and get a proper job, but who knows when the machines will takeover and who controls the batteries?
What if a child performs badly under a particular robot? We experience many times in Korea a student who is unable to understand the dialect of a foreign teacher, could this be the case for robots? Will these robots be asexual? I mean what about the young boys who fantasize about their French teacher, will they really have those same feelings for something that is straight out of AI?
David Holt - Online Blog 