I, robot teacher

Abstract

'I know the future is scary at times, sweetheart. But there's just no escaping it'. Ernest Cline, Armada As I sit here on Planet Zoom during the global COVID-19 pandemic and try to figure out how to make my online educational foundations courses as interesting, compelling, and fun as their face to face versions, it has dawned on me that perhaps the most cogent analysis of our current moment, from a pedagogical perspective, was written in 1951 by Isaac Asimov (1951/1957). Titled 'The Fun They Had', this very short story (it fits on a one-page PDF) demonstrates precisely why I couldn't simply import my face-to-face courses as they looked and ran in the first two months of 2020 onto an online platform for the last two months of the semester and beyond. Asimov's story takes place in 2157, two centuries out from when Asimov wrote it. There, an 11-year old girl named Margie and her neighbor, a 13-year old boy named Tommy, have a conversation about a book that Tommy found the day before. Physical books are rare in the future, as everything has been digitized, including learning. What is even more compelling for Margie is that the book is about school. In Asimov's 2157, every student has an individualized 'mechanical' teacher, a robot that is engineered to ostensibly fit each child's learning abilities. 'School' takes place at home and has been atomized, so that children only interact outside of learning. When children are six, presumably at the start of their 'school' years, they learn how to take tests by learning how to fill out a punch card. On the day the story takes place, Margie's robot teacher is on the blink, and is being repaired by a mechanic. She is hopeful that the problem will necessitate the removal of the robot teacher for some time, as Tommy's was once when it lost its history content. Unfortunately for her, her robot teacher is repaired in short order, at which point she and Tommy part so that they can each go to 'school'. During the time when her 'teacher' is being overhauled, Margie and Tommy engage in a heated discussion about Tommy's book. A few details seem to startle Margie. First, there is the idea that teachers were people, not robots. This is confusing to Margie as she does not see how a person could know as much as her mechanical 'teacher', nor would she want a strange person to live with her family. Tommy explains that teachers didn't live with childreninstead they met in a designated building called a 'school'. On top of that, Tommy thinks a human could probably know almost as much as a robot teacher. The second feature of the book, the notion that children would gather together at a school to learn, fascinates Margie. She hates what she knows as 'school', and is wistful as her mother calls her into the house once her teacher is back up and running. The story ends with her daydreaming about 'the fun they had' in the school described in Tommy's book as her robot teacher CONTACT David W. Kupferman

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“…This exercise has two main goals. First, we need ‘to make sense of abstract, theoretical, academic ideas, and to discuss those ideas with both academic and non-academic audiences’ (Kupferman, 2020a). Second, ‘[w]e need fleshed out depictions of what educational futures look like.…”