When I look online it seems like there is always someone whining about how AI is taking away jobs and while that is tragic, if your job can be automated, you are just really unlucky or maybe what you specialized in wasn't that complicated to begin with.
Is AI still in the beginning stages though? I suppose that is something that we should be concerned with.
I am an ESL teacher both online and in person and there is always talk in my circles about how the industry could pivot to be one of artificial intelligence that will work for free and therefore all of us would be out of work.
Here's why I don't think we have anything to worry about just yet.
A very large part of teaching in person is the empathy aspect of things as well as being able to figure out what kids are interested in and relate to them on a personal level. I don't think that AI is capable of this and to give an example I will speak of a system that they tried to roll out in my own school where the kids all had their own login and they would go and talk to the AI system for additional education. The system was supposed to get into the head of each student but it quickly started to just give the same lessons for each one of them. When I would watch their lessons or ask them about it later, most of the students said they were confused and that the AI had difficulty understanding them.
This is something that is also probably unique to a human ear. Thai kids speaking English in a half sort of way would be un-understandable to someone who doesn't work in this field and in the case of the microphone to our AI robot friend, the system would regularly not understand them even though I did. Was this because their language is a little south of perfect? Absolutely that is the case. However, this is something that you have to approach gradually in my experience. If you focus on a kid saying the words Exactly right for too long, they lose interest. Kids are like that. You have to provide entertainment to them or their minds wander. AI perhaps at this point in time doesn't seem to understand this and will just have the student repeat the same question over and over again.
I have experienced this in my own language studies using DuoLingo, which does use AI. It will ask the same question over and over and over again because repetition apparently in the mind of AI, encourages you to remember.
That's not true though. Repetition of the same tough question simply encourages me to cheat and I would imagine the same would be true of a child.
The robot, which is just a screen, cannot replicate the "human" side of things such as establishing a bond and realizing the "ticks" of a particular student. At least not yet.
[src[(I'm a relatively popular online teacher for ESL and a lot of this has to do with the fact that I have established a sort of personal relationship with my students. I know their favorite football teams, I know the music they like, I know what cartoons they enjoy and I integrate this into lessons with them. Since many of these lessons are completely up to me and the student as far as how they progress, often I don't even have a lesson in mind and instead just have a chat with them about their lives. The AI ESL things I have seen always have an agenda or a series of bullet-points that they have to get through in the time frame provided.
This might work really well as far as the military is concerned, but ESL classes tend to be a bit more relaxed than your average boot camp.
I have heard of people that establish a near unhealthy sort of "friendship" with their phone's AI assistant, and there are movies made about this sort of phenomenon. To me though, this isn't a breakthrough, this is mental illness on the part of the person talking to a phone as if it were a person.
The AI program that my school was so excited to roll out was scrapped just about a month after it was introduced because we weren't seeing any gains on the part of the students, and the students quickly started to hate this one on one time in the little voting box where they were intentionally put in a "zero distraction sort of sensory depriving environment.
Kids don't like that and if kids don't like something, they are very unlikely to continue doing it for any longer than they absolutely must.
I often feel like a circus show when I am teaching in person and this is actually one of the downsides of teaching ESL but it is a part of ESL and is very likely to always be that way.
I'm not saying that AI can't possibly take over this job, but it isn't there yet. Now when it comes to coding or doing engineering work, those sorts of professions probably need to be a bit concerned about their future. As far as wandering around a teaching kids how to speak a second language is concerned, our job as ESL teachers is more entertainer than it is educator and until AI figures out a way to bridge that gap - as well as maintain control of a room of 20 kids - I don't have anything to worry about.
