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Just Straight FACS

Anybody can read a room. Whether it's at a party, an important meeting, a funeral, or a Pre-Calculus lesson at 8 a.m., it's easy to look around and see how the people around you are feeling due to body language and facial expression.

Others don't think so, though. Prof. Thomas Huang and his team of experts have come up with new tech that can recognize all 44 muscles in the human face, and create a diagnostic on how a person is feeling. This is interesting, yes, but some may think that this technology could be used in classrooms to get a general feel on what each student is feeling about a lesson.

I believe that using the FACS (Facial Action Coding System) in a classroom setting would have no merit and would just be a waste of time and money in public schools across America, because of how weak the technology in the FACS actually is.

In the text, Dr. Huang says that "facial expressions for each emotion are universal," and that "varying degrees of expression" can still be used to recognize the feelings and emotions of any human being. When applying this to a classroom enviroment, this can't be correct. That is due to many natural factors in humans.

For example, the world has progressed a lot, and more children with mental disabilities and special needs are being allowed to be involved in regular classes. For a student with a form of autism, it may be hard for them to convey certain emotions on a regular basis. The technology wouldn't be able to read their face correctly. Another example is for a student with a physical disability whose face couldn't be read properly by the FACS. There are too many outliers for the technology to be accurate, unless you had a room of children who all express their emotions like an open book.

The text also says that "most human communications are nonverbal." I agree with this statement, actually. It proves that one can never tell what a person is thinking just by what they say, or their facial expressions. The only true place you can know how somebody really feels is in their mind. I, for one, never really say or express how I feel about school infront of any sort of teacher or staff. It's a general rule among students at my school to onlt talk about teachers or lessons outside of the classroom. Now, this may not be how it is in other public school settings. If it happened to, though, then the FACS technology would be obsolete in its purpose.

Lastly, in paragraph 9, the text says that according to the Facial Feedback Theory of Emotion, "putting on a face", or a poker face, actually trains your body to be in a better mood. This means that literally anyone could trick the FACS into thinking that they were in a happy mood when need be. Students could easily "beat the system" by manipulating the FACS into giving off a false diagnostic every time, and therefore ruining the FACS's credability. Until the FACS can tell when a group of teenagers are faking their emotions, it can't perform its main task.

In conclusion, Dr.Huang's FACS technology cannot work due to how baseless it's ethics are, how difficult it really is to understand emtions just by facial expression, and how easy it is to manipulate it's process.

Score: 4