Freewrite - “Simplicity is…”

Ms. Cumberbatch had been a teacher for a very long time. She remembered back when students used to write notes on actual paper and pass them to each other. And when the only way to submit homework you hadn't done was to get another person to do it for you.

Kids were still kids in many of the ways that counted. Some were highly motivated, some were lazy, some were troubled. Some had dreams, some lived nightmares. But there was something different these days.

When the internet became a thing, it seemed like nothing else could top the impact it had on education. Even an old fossil like herself was shuffled into workshop after workshop to get tech savvy enough to deal with the new reality but this new AI deal made that last shift look so insignificant.

The kids submitted all the answers all of the time but they were even less engaged than ever. They were starting to lose skills they had mastered a year or two before and what could you even tell them? “Study hard or you won't get a job that this bot is already better at than 75% of humans”? And now they were starting to try to tell the kids to all be plumbers or electricians the way they used to try to make them all into lawyers or doctors. As if oversaturation had never happened once in the history of the job market.

Then she heard about a revolutionary new microlearning environment that was somehow producing creative, critical thinking, well rounded graduates from the start. It was solar powered and completely off the grid. The students learned from tutors in small batches, worked on hands-on tasks in teams or independently and recorded their thoughts on little slates with chalk. No screens whatsoever.

The future was tech from 200 years ago apparently. But if it worked, she wasn't about to complain. It was high time she retired anyway.