I am not a robot.

Teaching and learning in the 21st Century

Updated April 24, 2022. To give some idea of how the public conversation around teaching has been going since I wrote the original essay in February, a tweet from the guy who sang “Save a Horse, Ride a Cowboy” dispensing pedagogical advice has over 10,000 retweets.

John Rich (of Big & Rich) on Twitter: “If a teacher is doing their job, you should never know about their political, details of their personal life or cultural stances. #JustTeach.”

My memory of it is clearly-carved: a bright spherical hall, hundreds of round little-boy heads, and Pliapa, our mathematics teacher. We called him Pliapa— he was rather vintage and disheveled, and when the monitor inserted his plug from behind, the loudspeaker started up “Plya-plya-plya-tshhhhh,” and then the lesson began.

-WE, Yevgeny Zamyatin (1921), Translation by Natasha Randall (2006)

The word “robot” derives from a Czech word which means something like serf. It connotes forced, mindless labor.

Being, becoming, or being replaced by a robot we…