Are Teachers Headed For Obsolescence?

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?"

Comments

Re:Ha, you threaten teacher jobs and see what happ

[ClioCJS]

where are you that teachers make $80K? That does not jive with national salary rates.

are teachers going the way of the Dodo?

[l3v1]

are teachers going the way of the Dodo?

1. See Betteridge's law of headlines.

2. No. But the current methodologies of teaching are. Unfortunately, teaching methods do not adapt fast enough, and this in turn causes a lot of trouble, e.g. kids not having enough and up-to-date knowledge and information about certain fields so as they can properly choose their further study fields, which can even result in badly planned and chosen careers (yes, this is a bit on the extreme side, but true nonetheless).

I'm a teacher . . .

[Anonymous Coward]

The thought that children will be able to learn anything by watching a video is just laughable...
I teach middle school math, and the level of apathy and carelessness in work is very high. There is no substitute for students being in a classroom, actually doing work.
However, if all you want to do is compare a LECTURE to a VIDEO, then sure, "teachers" can be replaced. However, "Teacher" in that context really is just "Lecturer".

There's a lot more to teaching than being on a stage and talking at people. Anyone who says otherwise is ignorant, selling something, or both.

Re:Ha, you threaten teacher jobs and see what happ

[craigminah]

Teachers in Chicago make nearly that yet their students' score poorly on standardized tests.

Re:Ha, you threaten teacher jobs and see what happ

[fishthegeek]

A three month vacation? Pardon me but uhmmmmm no. What you get as a teacher is a three month layoff without pay. Yes they might receive paychecks but that is money withheld from their "in-session" checks. As for working during the summer, yes teachers do. Even if it's two weeks it's still two weeks without pay.

Re:Ha, you threaten teacher jobs and see what happ

[jjohnson]

It's easy to find teachers in North America making $80k. Sometimes that's just handling cost of living in an area like New York, but frequently it comes from a trick education "reformers" have pushed over the last few decades to gut the unions.

1. Offer teachers per student overage fees to handle larger than normal classes. Teachers agree because, hey, the district is going to screw us on class size anyway, might as well get paid for it.
2. Lay off/make redundant/fire every second teacher, dumping those students on the first teacher, who now makes not-double their salary, but quite a lot more. Bitching and moaning ensue, district makes noise about saving taxpayers money, parents who voted in Republicans say "at least our taxes didn't go up..."
3. Wait a couple years.
4. Run for office on a platform of cutting teacher's salaries and point to the gym teacher making $90k/year because he's got a class of 60 students. Cue outraged parents exclaiming "why does my kid's teacher make more than me! I'm a manager!"
5. Salaries are frozen, or experienced/high paid teachers are laid off, and inexperienced teachers hired in their stead who don't get the overage fee originally negotiated.

Unions are the front lines of the class size debate. Every administrator wants to increase class size to economize on the number of teachers. Teachers want to keep class sizes sane so they can actually teach as opposed to doing crowd control. The union negotiates class size limits. This is how districts con the union into breaking class size limits, and it's a trap.