WEEKLY ROT

WEEKLY ROT

Dear Mr Jobs,

I’ve got your iBook and your iPod. OK, I’ve got two of each. I’ll have the iPhone as soon as it’s available in NZ, I promise. But what I really want is the iTeacher.

The iTeacher is slim and stylish and very wantable. All the very cool teachers will have it. It’ll do everything and it’ll do it all with panache.

It’ll float in the air above the playground monitoring health and safety issues. The little iCamera will spot any miscreants and wifi a message to the iOwner. The American version will have an iTaser attachment, which will immobilise any brats before they do anything bad in the playground such as use bad language or eat dirt. The NZ version won’t have the iTaser attachment – but we’ll have an iSerious-Telling-Off because that’s more in keeping with our constitutional right to bear politically-correct arms.

The iTeacher will be able to attend staff meetings on behalf of its iOwner. It’ll record the discussions and automatically delete the snoring from the maths teacher and the nervous ums and ahhs from the SMT.

The iTeacher will be able to play music of course –soothing stuff to calm the teacher. It’ll know when payday is and it’ll play stirring revolutionary stuff.

It’ll have a phone because all gadgets do. It’ll ring occasionally to give the illusion of friends calling.

The iTeacher will run iPlatitude which will use furry cuddly logic and speech emulation software to utter things like ‘well done, and if you try next time you might get a D’, and ‘good morning boss, you’re looking well today’, and ‘oh excellent, it’s Monday morning, I can’t wait to get to my year eight class – we’re doing fractions for the 12th time this month’.

This same software will do assessments. It’ll mesh with the ministry’s statistics computer. Every kid will get a merit. This will automatically generate press releases that say the ministry is magnificently successful and effective, but that schools are not.

Being wifi the iTeacher will be able to connect to the world via the holy oracle – the internet. This means I need never plan a lesson again – because as everyone knows when a teacher and a classroom have gadgets and the internet access, kids become instant rocket scientists. I don’t know how that works, but I don’t know how my iPod works either. I just know that if the iTeacher works, I don’t have to – and at this time of the year, that’s a very convincing sales pitch.

The iTeacher won’t be able to drink Kenyan coffee and tarte au citron. But if it does everything I do, I’ll be redundant.

So come on Mr Jobs, when’s the iTeacher being released?

— Peter Giddens