Just an Idea: Schools, Teachers and the Year Ahead

What's going on in your life right now? I feel like some of us are getting through OK and trying our best to do that. Some of us are falling and slipping through the cracks - having lost jobs and even our homes. Others are so rich they don't even notice.

Make no mistake: we are living through a disaster. A lot of what I read says it was a preventable disaster, and here's what I worry about, no matter what political party you favor:

If politicians can't do simple things like keep the post office running, what help are they going to be in a pandemic? 

No where is this failure more evident right now than in our schools. Teachers in every state are saying it's too soon to bring children back to in-person classrooms. 

At the same time, experts are saying that not being in physical schools and using distance learning is robbing a generation of children from successful outcomes.

Is too much screen time bad for kids? Experts say yes to that, too. Is it harder to supervise them when you're trying to work from home or going to an office? Yes. Could plexiglass around each socially distanced desk help children from catching or spreading COVID-19?

Could be. Should we try that for every classroom? Maybe we should. But I'm also trying to listen to what teachers are saying. Forcing kids to wear masks all day and stay at their desks really scares me. Plus, it isn't really giving them social time.

What do parents who homeschool their children do? From what I hear via home schooling friends, parents create a family classroom with a lot of learning experiences, inside and outside. And children who are home schooled are keeping up well with peers in regular schools.

But if both parents are working full or part time and can't be with their kids all day? What then?

This may be a crazy idea, okay? But.

What if there could be robot teachers that looked either like real people or cool versions of them that could actually come to people's homes? 

What if they were programmed each week with real teacher's voices and lesson plans so teacher's would still be doing their jobs and getting paid for them?

I don't know whether we'd wind up with actual replicas of the teachers or a more "embodied" Alexa or  Star Wars types. I don't know exactly who would pay for it. To me, it seems that should be the government's responsibility for as long as children have to stay home from conventional schools.

Whatever we do, teachers should still be able to keep their jobs as the weekly force behind the robots; and kids should still be able to get the socialization time they need through their interactions with the robots. No living teacher is replaceable--and this is just a stopgap idea.

I can't really say much more about how to navigate our current dilemmas, but I think we have the technology to do it. I'm saying this because our kids need solutions, and they need them fast. 

Will robotics work? I don't know. It's just an idea, and we really need new ideas. I don't know what to suggest, and of course I'm not in charge.

If you are, and you're reading this, I hope you are at least doing some outside the box thinking on how to deal with school. Most of all, I hope you come up quickly with some good ideas of your own.

Robot photo: Didricks