Wednesday, March 18, 2020
Teachers can't be offshored or automated
In previous rant I didn't include teachers at first. I was thinking more of caste than skill. But in fact schoolteachers, like barbers and baristas, are non-offshorable and non-automatable, and schoolteachers are being shut down even more than baristas.
Here's what focused my attention on the important attribute...
Google handles patents clumsily. Despite 100 years of development, OCR is still twitchy on old blurred documents. Searching by the expected terms doesn't work well, so you have to browse manually by date. While searching manually for more info on the first Remington typewriter, I bumped into this thing:
1873 courseware!
Education has always tried automation. Properly used, machines and courseware can HELP teachers. My courseware helps students understand anatomy and medical terminology in a way that a paper book can't, so it's somewhat useful. But the PHYSICAL PRESENCE of a good teacher running REAL PHYSICAL LABS AND EXPERIMENTS is absolutely irreplaceable.
= = = = =
DonorsChoose is making a special appeal to help teachers who are trying to deal with the shutdown, and naturally I donated a bit. If you want to do the same, here.
Later in the day: The fund is growing fast. When I wrote the above, the fund was about $50k. Just now (4pm), I went back and gave more. Now the fund is $150k. Next day: $310k.
1873 courseware!
Education has always tried automation. Properly used, machines and courseware can HELP teachers. My courseware helps students understand anatomy and medical terminology in a way that a paper book can't, so it's somewhat useful. But the PHYSICAL PRESENCE of a good teacher running REAL PHYSICAL LABS AND EXPERIMENTS is absolutely irreplaceable.
= = = = =
DonorsChoose is making a special appeal to help teachers who are trying to deal with the shutdown, and naturally I donated a bit. If you want to do the same, here.
Later in the day: The fund is growing fast. When I wrote the above, the fund was about $50k. Just now (4pm), I went back and gave more. Now the fund is $150k. Next day: $310k.Labels: Experiential education
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