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Well fucking said. For a lot of kids, their teacher is one of the few stable adults in their life. There's a ton of social and emotional things kids learn from good teachers beyond just book knowledge.

Though there are plenty of people who could provide the social side but aren't equipped to teach the curriculum. Perhaps you could use an AI teacher to deliver lessons that the class teacher was not qualified to teach. This could be done with the real teacher in the room.

One of the best teachers my child ever had was limited to teaching first grade due to a lack of maths ability. Everything else about them was fantastic. Maybe AI teachers can help in cases like that.

There are plenty of people who can do the technical side of teaching the curriculum. Most of them can earn more elsewhere doing a job that is considerably less stressful. Education needs to be funded so that it can attract people and it needs to be reorganized to reduce the stress.

The vast majority of what is taught in primary schools doesn't need a lot of subject matter skill, what it needs is the ability to teach and the toughness to survive the environment. And it has to pay well enough to attract people who have those qualities because those same qualities make those people attractive to other employers.

> There are plenty of people who can do the technical side of teaching the curriculum. Most of them can earn more elsewhere [...]

Yes.

One problem I come across repeatedly is: how do you identify whether someone has the technical competence to do the teaching? Is there any way of knowing if they're doing a good job?

As an IC they are implementing features and shipping products. As a teacher...? Test scores going up is uncorrelated with teaching quality, apparently. (NYC, just look at the scatterplot in [1].) So it seems like there's a deep problem here.

Now imagine someone in K-12 hiring a CS teacher. Who do they have that is competent to evaluate the skills of the person they want to hire? Probably nobody at all.

[1] https://garyrubinstein.wordpress.com/2012/02/28/analyzing-re...

> One problem I come across repeatedly is: how do you identify whether someone has the technical competence to do the teaching? Is there any way of knowing if they're doing a good job?

Classroom observation. It's really not that complicated.

There's something called Math for America that offers a substantial stipend to math teachers in New York with an application that involves a written portion, observation reports, recommendations, Praxis test scores, and interviews.

> There are plenty of people who can do the technical side of teaching the curriculum. Most of them can earn more elsewhere [...]

It's funded by a billionaire former mathematician who wanted to address this exact issue.

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