School teacher — tasks, one by one

Preparing lessons and materials

Generating worked examples, quiz variants and differentiated versions of a text is fast and good enough to use, and teachers were among the earliest heavy adopters of the general-purpose tools. The planning judgement — what this class needs next given what happened yesterday — still comes from the person who was in the room yesterday.

Time returned to a teacher is rarely time removed from a school's staffing. It shows up as capacity for the duties that were already being squeezed, not as fewer teachers.

Marking and written feedback

First-pass marking of structured work and draft feedback on writing are among the most-used education applications, because they attack the task teachers most resent. The teacher still moderates the grade and decides what to say to this child; the hours of routine reading shrink substantially.

Automated feedback on writing is only as good as the rubric, and students learn quickly to write for the machine. Schools that let it replace rather than assist the teacher's reading have seen the quality of feedback fall.

Running the room

This is a physical, relational task with legal responsibility for minors attached, and no technology under development addresses it. It is also, for most teachers, the majority of the working day, which is why the occupation's overall exposure is low despite its planning and marking tasks changing fast.

This protects the profession's headcount far better than its working conditions. The tasks being automated are the ones teachers do at home; the ones that exhaust them are untouched.

Explaining, and noticing who did not get it

One-to-one tutoring systems explain patiently and adapt to a single learner, and for motivated students with access they are a real complement. Reading a room of thirty, most of whom did not choose to be there, is a different problem: the adaptation is social as much as cognitive, and it is the part parents and systems continue to pay a human for.

Tutoring systems work best for motivated students with access — which is a statement about who benefits, not about whether classroom teaching changes. The gap they widen is between students, not between teachers and machines.

Orchestrating tutoring tools

Where schools have brought tutoring systems into class, the teacher's role has shifted towards designing how they are used and monitoring their output. Teachers also now have to teach students how to use these tools honestly, which is new curriculum that lands on them with no extra time.

This arrives as new curriculum with no extra time, which the site's own reasoning says explicitly. New responsibility without new hours is a workload change, not a new role.