The technological age has advanced to the point of being able to calculate the complex emotions of the Mona Lisa, and there's proposal for moving into classrooms as well. However, this is a sentiment that must be rejected wholeheartedly. Despite possible learning benefits, facial recognition technology in the classroom would be ineffective and would constitute an invasion of privacy.

Facial recognition software would be an ineffective addition to the classroom environment. In paragraphs 5 and 6, D'Alto writes of how the computer can sense emotions just like humans can, stating, "In fact, we humans perform this same impressive 'calculation' every day. For instance, you can probably tell how a friend is feeling simply by the look on her face." The human body has a natural ability to sense emotions within others by performing calculations based on the subtle body movements of others. Even if a machine could replicate this, as the article suggests, it doesn't dimish the face that humans already possess this capability. No emotion detecting software currently available provides anything that a human being couldn't detect, therefore adding them to the classroom would only be providing information that the teacher could already know. Teachers can detect boredom, stress, and enjoyment just like the computer would, and, if they so wish, they can change their lesson appropriately. Technology that reads emotions would be innefective and unneeded in the classroom.

Software that can read emotions could, in a classroom, invade the personal, privite lives of the students its watching over. Due to the nature of being a computer, the technology could, as stated in paragraph 6, "'...recognize when a student is becoming confused or bored.'" The level of understanding stops at simply recognizing the emotion; a computer cannot discern the reason behind each emotion because it only detects that the emotion is there. Now place that into a classroom, where students from all different backgrounds are coming together to learn, and there will be some students that have had a rough day. Something happened outside of school that was out of their control, and they're just trying to make it through the day and avoid conversation about it. Sadly, they walk into class, and a computer, which a teacher is giving a lesson, notices that the student is distracted and continually pesters them to pay attention, even though the student's interest is not on schoolwork at all. Life is not contained to just the classroom, and external factors will effect a student's emotion before, during, and after class. Those factors could be incredibly personal, but the technology, not being able to sense anything other than emotion, analyzes this personal part of someone's life as much as it would do a bored kid in class. This is a blatant invasion of students' privacy and needs to be prevented from doing such.

D'Alto argues that the technology could provide substancial benefits to the classroom by creating personalized programs for each student to remain interested, but this process would just prove overall inneffective or exhorbitantly expensive to implement. To provide reason for this technology being implemented in classes, D'alto states in paragraph 6 that "'A classroom computer could recognize when a student is becoming confused or bored,' Dr. Huang predicts. 'Then it could modify the lesson, like an effective human instructor.'" This has to be looked at in two different scenarious: a group class and a personalized class. For the group class, modifying the lesson would be overall inneffective because it would cause other students that used to be enjoying class to become bored and lethargic, thus prompting the computer to modify the lesson. The cycle would continue until the end of class, with the technology switching teaching methods so often that calling the class coherent would be blatant lying. This modification method would only work if each student had their own computer modifying the lesson. In that scenario, each student would be personally invested into what they were learning. However, it also means that each student would need their own computer that holds this technology. For technology that currently is too complicated for ordinary computers to comprehend, that would require schools to invest exhorbitant amounts of money purchasing new computers that could hold this software. For every student to have a computer would be way too expensive for any implementation to be cost-effective. Despite possible learning benefits, the technology would either be too expensive to be implemented or too innefective to be used.

It's an interesting concept to imagine a world where computers are able to sense emotions and create a personalized program for each person on Earth. However, this imagination is riddled with expenses, invasion of privacy, redundancy, and overall inneffectivity. As the technology age progresses, it's important to remember to leave teaching to the teachers.