A simple way to understand how much teaching has changed is to ask any experienced teacher what the job looked like ten years ago and what it looks like now. The title has not changed, the whiteboard is still in the classroom, and the bell still rings at the same hour. But somewhere between smartphones, social media and a ChatGPT tab open during lectures, the actual work of teaching has quietly transformed. The numbers reflect that shift. A RAND survey of 1,214 young people in the United States aged 12 to 29 found that the share using generative AI for schoolwork rose from 48% in May 2025 to 62% by December 2025, with the increase driven largely by middle- and high-school students.
This Teachers’ Day, instead of the usual tributes, TheNews21 spoke to three people who think about this transformation from very different angles: an educator who runs her classroom like a live agency, a counselling psychologist who sees the pressures teachers carry, and an education-technology executive focused on what teachers will need next. The question to all three was essentially the same: if AI and digital tools can answer almost anything, what is a teacher actually for? Their answers reveal not only what has changed, but also what remains deeply human about the profession.
The Teacher Is No Longer the Only Source of Information
Prof. Dr Priya Menon Nair, Director, MET Institute of Mass Media, does not believe teachers have lost their authority simply because students now have access to AI. “Any first-year student can out-search a professor in the time it takes to open a new tab. But I’ve never believed raw information was what a good teacher was actually offering,” she says. “What we offer is judgement, forged under pressure.” She gives a simple example. Ask an AI tool for a tagline and it may produce several options almost instantly. What it cannot necessarily do, she argues, is explain to a 19-year-old why four of those lines are safe, predictable and instantly forgettable. “That is exactly what no AI model can reproduce, in my opinion,” she says.
For Dr Nair, the authority of the teacher has not vanished; it has shifted. The teacher’s value, she says, has moved from “knows the facts” to “has taste, and can defend it under questioning.”
The Myth of the ‘Distracted Generation’
It has become common to blame smartphones for shortening attention spans and making students harder to teach. Dr Nair pushes back against that diagnosis. “I think that’s the wrong diagnosis,” she says. “Students who spend hours scrolling every day still show up completely present for the right kind of assignment — one with a genuine budget, real-world consequences, and a pitch deadline instead of a syllabus deadline.” Her argument is that attention has not disappeared; rather, students have developed what she describes as “an allergy to passive delivery.” A 90-minute lecture may lose them quickly, she says, but give them a real constraint, a deadline and an audience that can reject their work, and the response changes. “Hand them a real budget they could genuinely blow, or a real audience that might say no, and I’ve watched the phones go face-down without anyone asking,” she says.
Banning AI Is a Battle Already Lost
On the question every staffroom is now confronting — what to do when students use ChatGPT or similar tools for assignments — Dr Nair has little faith in outright prohibition. “I think trying to ban it is a battle already lost, and fought on the wrong front besides,” she says. Instead, she treats AI output as a rough first draft and evaluates what the student does after receiving it. “Show me your prompt history, show me what you threw out and why, defend the one line you kept over the nine the model handed you,” she says. Her deeper concern is not simply cheating. “AI quietly removes the productive failure students actually need in order to grow,” she says. “If a chatbot hands a student a passable tagline on the first try, that student never has to sit with the discomfort of writing nine bad lines before the tenth one finally works — and I believe that discomfort is the actual training.” That, in turn, is reshaping what teachers themselves need to learn. Dr Nair believes educators will increasingly require fluency in what AI can and cannot do, the ability to redesign assignments as formats change, stronger one-on-one mentoring skills, and greater emotional bandwidth for students dealing with pressure.
The Invisible Half of the Job
This is where the conversation shifts from classroom strategy to something heavier: what all of these changes are doing to teachers themselves. Dr Nair is blunt about role overload. “I don’t think that’s sustainable for any one person to carry alone,” she says. She has seen institutions try to distribute responsibility through team leads, shared tracking and structural support rather than stacking the roles of counsellor, disciplinarian, technology guide and mentor onto a single teacher. “I think that genuinely helps. But I don’t think it fully solves the problem,” she says.
Aarushi Sabharwal, a counselling psychologist, sees a similar pressure from the mental-health side. “Technology itself isn’t the problem,” she says. “But the fact that students are constantly digitally connected can create additional psychological and behavioural problems for teachers that could contribute to stress, emotional fatigue and burnout.” The data is striking. A Gallup study found that 52% of U.S. K-12 teachers said they felt burned out “always” or “very often”, while 35% of college and university employees reported the same. Sabharwal is careful not to blame technology alone. “Saying smartphones or AI directly cause teacher burnout is too simplistic,” she says. Workload, administrative duties, large class sizes and lack of institutional support all contribute, with technology often amplifying pressures that were already present.
Dr Nair makes a similar point. For her, burnout comes partly from “being on permanent emotional call for students going through real distress, with no formal backup in place,” along with the weight of documentation and the need to keep learning new tools while curriculum systems move more slowly than the industry around them. Sabharwal argues that schools need to treat teacher well-being as an institutional responsibility rather than something individual teachers must solve alone. She recommends regular mental-health support, peer discussions, adequate breaks, clear digital-boundary policies and genuine space for teachers to switch off after work.
Training Teachers for a Job That Keeps Changing
Manish Mohta, Managing Director of Learning Spiral Pvt. Ltd., believes teacher training itself needs a substantial rethink. “Reading the definition of ‘smartboard’ or ‘AI tool’ does not help,” he says. “An instructor must appreciate how a certain technology transforms the way students gather and process information, think, collaborate and solve problems.” Professional development, in his view, should be rooted in actual classroom problems rather than abstract technology training. That means working with lesson plans, student responses and real teaching situations, and helping educators understand when AI improves learning and when it removes the struggle students need in order to learn properly.
His advice to teachers entering the profession is equally direct. “You should never think of competing with technology when it comes to its main tasks,” he says. A teacher’s value lies elsewhere, he argues: in knowing students well enough to ask the right questions, identify mistakes, recognise confusion and sometimes understand that a student does not need another explanation but simply encouragement. Mohta also believes teachers should treat their own classroom practice as an experiment. Not every lesson will work, he says, and that is not failure; it is part of the process of becoming better at teaching.
What Can a Human Teacher Give That AI Cannot?
The question running through all three conversations is not whether AI will become more powerful. It almost certainly will. The more difficult question is what remains uniquely human in the classroom when information, explanations and even feedback can increasingly be generated instantly. Dr Nair’s answer returns to the idea of failure, judgement and presence. “Real learning has never come from getting something right on the first try,” she says. “It comes from a live pitch, an actual client, a real audience with the power to say no.” More than ever, she argues, the teacher’s job is to create a space where students can fail without being abandoned by the process. “More than ever, I believe the teacher’s job is to hold that room open for failure — and to still be standing in it when the student is ready to try again.”
This Teachers’ Day, that may be one of the clearest definitions of the profession in the age of AI. Technology can generate answers, rewrite sentences, solve equations and produce ideas in seconds. But knowing when a student needs to be challenged, when they need to struggle, when they need guidance and when they simply need someone to believe they can try again still requires something more than computation. For now, that remains the teacher’s job.
