Someday Robots Will Take My Job

It's Columbus Day. But for us Alaska teachers, it's still a work day. There's a district wide inservice, which means the teachers are all here (but no students). All the teachers are breaking off into groups according to their grade level and content area to participate in training. My training is a webinar and conference call to introduce a new type of teaching software that grades papers. This sounds boring on the surface, but I found it disturbing enough to write about.

I use the word disturbing because when I say that the software grades papers, I don't mean it grades multiple choice tests like a Scantron machine. I mean it grades essays. I don't know exactly how it works, and I don't particularly know if I want to know, but essentially an essay is put into the computer and a grade is almost instantly pumped out. Sure this makes my job easier, but what does this mean for the future of teaching?

One of the reasons why I became an English teacher because I enjoy its subjectivity. It's not math. There's more than one answer. There's countless ways to analyze a piece of literature. This essay-grading supercomputer is taking away that subjectivity in my opinion. What now defines a good paper? A set of key phrases that the computer is programmed to recognize? It just feels wrong. Sure, the counter-argument will be that eliminating subjectivity is a good thing. A student's grade will no longer be determined by what type of teacher they get and "how hard" they grade papers. We've all been in situations where what was good enough for an A in one class was barely good enough for a C+ in another. That's certainly not a good thing, but teachers should be able to recognize what makes good paper. By putting data into a machine, we take the responsibility away from teachers.

Teaching jobs seem safe from outsourcing, but for how long? More and more college students take online classes every year. How long before we have high school students taking classes from home? Will we see a University of Phoenix Online Middle School pop up? I love using technology in the classroom, but I sometimes wonder where it will stop. The technological toys that I have in the classroom sometimes make me forget I'm in the middle of the Alaskan tundra. Our school already has math classes taught on a monitor by a woman 40 miles away.  I traveled almost 4,000 miles to teach up here. Will teachers in the future always have to make that journey?