Are Teachers Headed For Obsolescence? 570
dstates writes "One Laptop Per Child reports encouraging results of a bold experiment to reach the millions of students worldwide who have no access to primary school. OLPC delivered tablets to two Ethiopian villages in unmarked boxes without instructions or instructors. Within minutes the kids were opening the boxes and figuring out how to use the Motorola Zoom tablets, within days they were playing alphabet songs and withing a few months how to hack the user interface to enable blocked camera functionality. With the Kahn Academy and others at the high school level and massive open online courses at the college level, are teachers going the way of the Dodo?"
Are Teachers Headed For Obsolescence? (Score:5, Insightful)
No.
Two Things (Score:5, Insightful)
The idea that a third world nation can spend little and utilizes said technologies is critical to their economic success and transitioning to second and first world status.
Yes, these things will successfully replace teachers where there were no teachers in the first place. Everywhere else they are important as augmenting tools on the path of education but the place where they will make the most progress for us is where they need teachers but have none.
Stupid headline, stupid conclusion. (Score:5, Insightful)
Slashdot's obsession with the disaster that is OLPC is laughable, as is the conclusion that it could replace teachers.
Is an OLPC better than nothing? Yes. Is it better than a proper teacher and resources? Heck no.
No they are not. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Ha, you threaten teacher jobs and see what happ (Score:4, Insightful)
I was basically going to post this very thing but you beat me to it.
Unionized government employees do not simply step aside gracefully and change jobs or learn new skills. They fight tooth and nail to maintain the status quo, with increasing ferocity the more obsolete they become.
Re:Are Teachers Headed For Obsolescence? (Score:2, Insightful)
Agreed. There will always be a need for good teachers, but maybe we could dump a bunch of the shitty ones.
Very Simple: No (Score:5, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The fun they had! (Score:4, Insightful)
Samzenpus at a new low (Score:5, Insightful)
Hey Samzenpus, when you hit rock bottom, STOP DIGGING!
Sure, I can see it now. 2000 kids in high-school, no teachers.
After the break, can monkeys be employed as caretakers for banana plantations. Next week an in-depth look at the results of giving the lunatics the keys to the asylum, test case: slashdot.
For those who are terminally stupid/libertarians, most people need oversight at least part of the time. Give kids a tablet and they will indeed use it, just as easily as my generation used a dictionary. To look up dirty words and hitting other kids with.
Yes some kids will indulge in self-study without encouragement, these kids need teachers most of all, to stop the other kids from beating them up.
A tablet is not anymore a teacher then a TV is a baby sitter.
Re:Ha, you threaten teacher jobs and see what happ (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not the simple stuff kids need help with (Score:2, Insightful)
A computer might be able to teach anyone how to program, math, English, etc. if they have the desire to learn, but it's the teachers job to give them that desire, and to assist, control and monitor the children.
If a child has a problem, then a teacher can easily help, especially if the child needs another way to look at the issue.
It's the teachers job to control the classroom and to make sure they don't start to beat up each other; another hard job at 2pm on a Friday.
It is the teachers job to monitor the children and to know if something is wrong with one of them. A teacher can be the only person a 12 yr old can go to and ask for help.
A lot of teachers are also more educated then most other professionals, with Masters degrees at least, and several years of experience before they are handed a classroom of their own.
And the most important thing: They have to deal with elected officials telling them how to teach, when the officials only qualification is "my kid goes to school".
Ya, we need to hand a kid a computer and tell them to teach themselves. It will be porn and WoW only within a couple of weeks.
Some kids don't need guidance (Score:5, Insightful)
But others do. A kid who has someone who can understand his thought processes and teach accordingly will come out better than if left alone (talking about the average kid here, not Mr G&T who'll be a physicist no matter what). So, I guess good teachers will always be needed, bad teachers have always been obsolete.
Re:Ha, you threaten teacher jobs and see what happ (Score:5, Insightful)
Which is amusingly ironic, considering how Slashdotters lay down and whine like helpless mewling pussies when they can't find a job, blaming offshoring, ageism, non-degreed-ism, and affirmative action.
Online learning is not good enough for the masses (Score:5, Insightful)
I know Slashdot loves to pull up these kinds of articles every time they're available. TED is susceptible similar lectures as well, so we who have actually worked in education have to keep our eyes open before the "computers will solve all our complex problems" crowd runs away with an invaluable source of social evolution.
Before the average Slashdotter writes off brick-and-mortar schools in favor of online learning with justifications like, "I was always bored in class", "I was smarter than my teacher", and "Just be open to change!" consider this: Is your average Slashdotter ANYTHING like your average American student?
The answer is that they simply are not. Slashdotters likely grew up in smaller than average social groups with access to technology. We adapt to new technology with little issue. We understand the underlying concepts of nested menus and function taxonomy. We are nerds and geeks who thrive on learning.
The rest of America's children do not thrive on learning and providing online education will not change that.
Having worked in middle schools, high schools, with community college transfer students, and then the resulting university undergrads, I have to say: If the general population doesn't HAVE to learn something or if there isn't something someone sufficiently passionate to help them learn something new regardless, they won't bother. Humanity is curious about the universe in that we consistently have some extremely smart people come to global acclaim for their works, but most people just want to live easy, have sex, and do so as long as possible.
It's the role of the educator to affect everyone, regardless of station or passion, and get them the minimum (plus) standard of knowledge and analytical capability so that they can learn more things and more complex concepts at the next level. This is something a computer with programed or limited responses cannot do.
Yes, OLPC can get kids excited about new things. Those children will NOT be starting hospitals in their villages with simple access to online education. They will not become cultural philosophers through online education. They will not begin building Motorola Zoom tablets with they learned via online learning. The concepts required to do any of those complex actions cannot be taught in a single plug-and-play manner. It requires a talented individual and as social an environment as possible to adjust the content to the user, to adjust the lesson plan to the person that day.
The only way teachers will ever go obsolete is if we are ignorant to assume that computers will ever substitute for the adaptive human mind.
Re:Two Things (Score:5, Insightful)
good teachers will be replaced the day that someone creates software which can teach a student something, have them explain it back, understand their explanation and the subtle ways in which they are wrong and correct them.
bad teachers on the other hand will be replaced the day that someone videos a teacher scribbling half legible stuff on the board while students try to copy it down.
Re:No they are not. (Score:2, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Ha, you threaten teacher jobs and see what happ (Score:5, Insightful)
True, the Canadian dollar is worth 0.000371$ less than the US dollar. What a significant difference that makes.
Re:Ha, you threaten teacher jobs and see what happ (Score:4, Insightful)
He was clear enough: public unions, which even FDR was against.
A public union is an absurd idea in the first place, who is supposedly 'oppressing' these teachers? They are working for the government, who is this 'evil capitalist' that is oppressing them?
Also who is paying their salaries, is it the politicians that they are negotiating with? NOPE. It's the tax payer and the tax payer is the one who is getting screwed on this deal, he is the sheep that 'participates' in the decision what's for dinner, except the other two sides at the table are 2 wolves (politicians and the public unions).
80k for living in NYC? (Score:4, Insightful)
So... you consider 80k to pay for living in NYC quite good pay, when you got a Masters degree?
You got to be fucking kidding me, that is low pay for a tech flunkie.
And you contract yourself, how many teachers for lower grades got a Masters degree?
My bet is your a republican by the ease by which you select among several made up statistics to combine in a non-existing entity which you claim to represent everything.
Proof me wrong, become a teacher if the pay is so good and the vacations that long, you would have to be an idiot not to switch. So why haven't you? Because you know you are pulling stats out of your ass?
Antique teaching method. (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm a teacher (university). I'm afraid that I often use a rather antique method in teaching: the Socratic method. Since I teach philosophy, most often one-to-one or one-to-two, perhaps it isn't such an inappropriate method.
If you can get a machine to do the teaching nearly as well and as inexpensively (although it isn't an inexpensive method), have at it.
Best wishes,
Bob
Re:Are Teachers Headed For Obsolescence? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Ha, you threaten teacher jobs and see what happ (Score:2, Insightful)
As senior teacher should be making as much if not more than a developer. We programmers like to think we're the shit, but what we do is really quite unimportant when compared to what a teacher does.
Re:Ha, you threaten teacher jobs and see what happ (Score:5, Insightful)
The difference is that only government employees can use the state's taxing power to enforce their demands on the rest of the population. The most everybody else can do is bitch about it.
Re:Ha, you threaten teacher jobs and see what happ (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Ha, you threaten teacher jobs and see what happ (Score:5, Insightful)
You're kidding, right? The evil capitalist who is oppressing them is you, demanding that teachers do incredibly hard work for crappy benefits and crappy pay. Just because someone is working a government job doesn't mean that there's no price pressure. The price pressure is actually worse, because jerks like you think it's perfectly fine to just keep cutting their pay year after year, and moreover think that they shouldn't be entitled to complain when you do.
Re:Salaries aren't the whole picture. (Score:4, Insightful)
awesome perks
You mean standard perks a generation or 2 ago ? Actually people spent the last 20 years explaining how better everyone would be by getting the union and pesky government off the workplace. So following that theory, without the unions the teachers would make a lot more than 80K and have much better perks, no wonder they complain and it is so hard to find good ones.
Re:Ha, you threaten teacher jobs and see what happ (Score:5, Insightful)
Who is 'oppressing' these teachers?
Administrators who suddenly decide to have a 3 hour meeting at the very end of the work day. Administrators who fire qualified teachers and hire their unqualified good buddy for the same position. Administrators who refuse to purchase enough text books for the number of students in a class. Administrators who don't plan man-power properly and have 40-50 kids in a classroom built to hold 30 max. Administrators who give performance reviews based on the attractiveness of a teacher. Administrators who maintain physical environments that are not condusive to learning (too hot, too cold, dirty, depressing, interruptions to class time). Administrators who assign extra duties that interfere with student's education, at no extra pay. Administrators who create a schedule that does not allow for even a lunch break, much less a restroom break for the teachers.
All of these examples are things that actually happend in the district that I worked for, and had clauses in the contract that were added, negotiated by the union and the school district.
Re:Ha, you threaten teacher jobs and see what happ (Score:5, Insightful)
More than 80% of students in Chicago public schools are poor enough to qualify for free lunches. Try improving the test scores of a group of kids living under the poverty line.
My wife teaches at an inner city high school. She has kids who skip school to work fast food jobs because their parent is a junkie and they're the only one bringing money in; students who skip to watch siblings while their single parent works; students who can't sleep because they hear sirens all night; students whose parents didn't teach them to wash with soap; students whose parents get drunk and trash their textbooks because they're offended that their kid might try to be smarter than them; students who haven't eaten in days, or whose only meal is the free lunch.
She had a student approach a speaker she brought in on bullying (afterwards), and tell him that he was being raped several times a week by a group of boys in the school.
Every problem to do with poverty shows up in the public schools. Among the many idiocies of standardized tests is that poor kids require a ton of effort just to get them to focus on being in school. You can't even start educating them until you've mitigated the worst of their circumstances somehow. You can't even start on test scores until you've solved basic social issues with poverty that are far out of your scope as a teacher--and in Chicago's public school system, that's a majority of the kids.
Re:Salaries aren't the whole picture. (Score:4, Insightful)
When did the U.S. become a nation that hates people who get paid well for doing a job that takes skill and training? When did a job that paid well and offered good benefits and the possibility of a good retirement, become something that you should be ashamed of having, rather than being a core part of the engine of the economy, the middle class?