Utopian:
As a language teacher, one of the elements that I struggled with in the past, and still do today, is connecting to my students personally while doing it in the target language of French. Many experts agree that the best way to teach a language class is to do in an immersed environment with the teacher speaking exclusively or mostly in that language. The challenge is that non French Immersion students will really struggle with comprehension. They will not yet have the skills to decode what is being said and will lack vocabulary and grammar knowledge to understand and to reply.
What happens in turn, is a reverting on the teacher’s part to English for when task instructions are complex or when a student wants to share a thought or concern. My experience has been that outgoing and advanced students are the ones who make stronger connections with me and unfortunately, the others are sometimes left behind. My utopian speculative future idea is one that I have thought about many times over the past ten years of my career.
The 2022 classroom environment has a new technology where the teacher speaks and their words are projected in front of them! The user (student) has the option for the appearing words to be translated into English (beginner level) or for them to appear in the target language (intermediate and advanced). This technology was developed during the Covid pandemic 2020, when in-class students faced a disadvantage of teachers and peers having to wear masks all day. As a result, it was harder not only to hear the teacher, but to lip read and imitate the mouth shapes to produce phonemes in the target language. Students can now personally manipulate the real world subtitles by zooming in and out as well as by changing the text to a personalize font. Too many patterns or colours behind the teacher? No problem, personalize the background upon which the words are projected with a solid black or white to contrast your text. Missed something? Did you have to leave the class to use the washroom? Easy… simply scroll back through the history for it to reveal the full speech of the teacher. Missed a class? Your teacher’s chosen dialogue is automatically uploaded to the class page. But what about when the teacher is having side conversations? No problem. They have the ability to mute themselves and temporarily pause the broadcast.
Dystopian:
I can’t believe it’s happening again. I mean didn’t we just go through this? I guess it was three months ago and yes, the government had decided that we would have four per year. Four per year. Just like the seasons. Was it the government or the formula that had decided? Sometimes it’s hard to separate lies from truth, especially after the bot era when these began to spread misinformation though the Metaverse. Then there were the malware bot attacks to the meta homes. The Metaverse… what a joke, Zuckerberg! As we moved to our new online universe, we all became completely detached from reality. Detached and fat. We all became unhealthy and burdened our failing post-pandemic medical system. But all of that is a topic for another day, if I am lucky.
The seasonal occurrences I am referring to are the culls, obviously. Only someone living under a rock would not know about the culls. We lost so many people. Here in France, we used to have 144 million people back in 2030. When the Cull Year One was over, that number was reduced to 108 million. That initial year global population reduction of 25 percent devastated the morale of the survivors, who then came to be known as the chosens.
Oh, you were living under a rock? Well let me explain the culls a bit more then. At the 2028 World Summit, the major players, China, the U.S., Russia, Germany, and the U.K. all gathered to decide that the best way to combat the issues related to Climate Change was to limit the population growth with forced sterilization for women after having their first child and to those who had already given birth. The other initiative was the cull, where an algorithm would decide the fate of global populations based on the usefulness of individuals. Homeless, poor, aged and criminals were the first to go. They were sent away to the carbon pools, lava fields or the mycelium forest networks.
Oh, hold on. An announcement is coming through on my Meta screen. The Formula has chosen the 2035 Q4 outcasts. If your name appears on your Meta home, your Meta access will immediately end, you will no longer be able to communicate through video or message portals and all access to building accesses for you living quarters will be temporarily shut down.
Guillaume Letour
Merde.
(Meta silence)