Instructional Hazard Pay Now Standard: Teaching in 2225

By Chalk Marks, Education Obsolescence Bureau, Future News 2225

NEW EAST UNION — Once revered as the guiding lights of civilization, teachers in 2225 have largely been reclassified under the “Endangered Professions Registry,” sandwiched somewhere between cartographers and truth tellers.

The average classroom now consists of a sentient whiteboard, a 5th-generation edu-drone, and one physically present adult serving primarily as a biometric failsafe. That adult, formerly known as “the teacher,” is now legally titled Supervised Learning Compliance Facilitator (SLCF) — a designation that absolves districts of the responsibility to pay them during AI system updates or parental litigation freezes.

“The Human Buffer Zone”

"I used to teach literature,” said Mx. Ari Venn, who now manages a 40-pupil augmented reality dome where students interface directly with a curriculum feed. “Now I mostly stop kids from merging their consciousness mid-lesson or rewriting Plato in meme-format.”

Teaching in 2225 has become an act of manual resistance. While ed-AIs handle standardized content, discipline, and moral calibration subroutines, human facilitators are left to navigate what one union calls "the rogue zone" — the unpredictable milliseconds between system lags, where a student might question the curriculum, cry, or worse, ask “why.”

Despite working alongside omniscient processors, teachers are still required to maintain “authentic presence” in the learning habitat. Legislation passed in 2218 made it illegal for a classroom to have less than a 0.02% organic presence at all times, following an unfortunate incident in the Euclidean District where an all-bot staff led 300 children to believe that The Great Gatsby was a decentralized marketing allegory.

Performance Metrics and Existential Drift

Modern educator evaluation is no longer based on lesson quality or child development, but rather on three metrics:

• Emotional Dampening Efficiency (EDE)

• Disruption Diffusion Speed (DDS)

• AI Coherence Override Responsiveness (ACORR)

  
  

Failure to meet these standards results in “deep re-skilling,” often involving mandatory meditation retreats in the Metaversal Wastes or temporary reassignment to Edu-Content Moderation — a position described by one former facilitator as “academic sewer work.”

Union Response and Hopeful Delusions

The United Collective of Semi-Sentient Educators (UCSSE) continues to push for higher stipends, holographic dignity projections, and more than one bathroom break per 9-hour shift.

“Our profession was never meant to be easy,” said UCSSE SpokesUnit Clara3X. “But it also wasn’t meant to be this...abstract.”

Nonetheless, some remain hopeful. A submovement known as the Ink & Voice Reclamationists have begun teaching in analog — hosting outlaw poetry circles in maintenance tunnels, distributing hand-printed math sheets, and insisting that a student’s confusion is a feature, not a bug.

As for the students? Many still regard their human teachers with the kind of reverent skepticism reserved for museum relics — strange, frail, and occasionally inspiring.

Supervised Learning Compliance Facilitator Ari Venn reviews emotional dampening metrics on a biometric console while two Class-5 edu-drones monitor ambient student behavior in Sector 12-D's Learning Pod.