I went on sabbatical last June and have since joined a small tech consultancy (and consider myself retired from teaching after about ten years at the high schoo

I went on sabbatical last June and have since joined a small tech consultancy (and consider myself retired from teaching after about ten years at the high school level). I have all sorts of strong feelings about this transition, but it was the right choice for my family. I hope your wife is able to come to a good place with it all. To your daydreaming: I believe there will be a roll for AI tools in education, but they will not be replacements for in-person instruction. They will assist teachers in being better educators. Unlike many professions where workers operate in concert with digital tools to unlock value that would be otherwise impossible to achieve, classrooms are essentially analog. The toolset I would like to build would start by mediating instruction with an assessment generation/proctoring tool that builds assessments in real time based on the lesson’s instructional content & conversational cues without significant curation required by the instructor (i.e. the system listens to the lesson as it unfolds and continuously generates/refines appropriate assessment content; the instructor should be able to complete a final curation and distribution of the assessment to students within a typical one to three minute instructional task/conversational break/etc). Right now, we spend billions of dollars on standardized testing (with all the inherent issues of that high stakes, non-longitudinal format), and while the same content is being regularly assessed by classroom instructors, we broadly don’t accept those results as trustworthy. Such a system as I’m considering could inject that trust into classroom assessments, allow for more frequent/high quality/low effort assessments - and provide a beachhead for building additional purpose built assistive tools for instructors. AI would likely provide utility to this tool, but the functional value cannot be separated from the fluid, branching path conversations of high quality in-person instruction.