New technologies are always interesting and beneficial towards any aspect of life. The FACS (Facial Action Coding System) measures your facial muscles to calculate your emotions. Because there are characteristic movements of muscles when expressing different emotions, the FACS can recogonize the muscle movement and record the emotion. This newly discovered technology has great potential to be useful in several areas, such as understanding facial expressions, animating facial emotions, and commercial use. However, the use of FACS technology is not valuable in the classroom.

First, the FACS's ability to read emotions is not useful in the classroom. It can tell when students are bored, or when students are unhappy with the teaching method, but it cannot change the students' emotions immediately. The best it can do is notify the instructor to change their lesson, as stated in the passage. This itself is not a huge benefit, and is not valuable enough to justify the use of the FACS technology in every classroom.

Secondly, the FACS is very recent, advanced, and expensive. As stated in the passage, "Your home PC can't handle the complex algorithms used to decode Mona Lisa's smile" (D'Alto, 7). If a home PC cannot run the FACS program because of its complexity, how would an impoverished school be able to provide this technology to every classroom? The cost of this technology to be placed in every classroom is a waste of money and time. Instead of being used in classrooms, this technology could play an important role in the study of art, such as Mona Lisa, or the creation of expressive virtual faces to be put in use for video surgery or virtual reality. The very limited benefits the FACS brings in the classroom does not outweigh the cost and effort of providing it.

In short, the FACS is a newly designed program that has potential to be applied in many different fields of study, but is not practical for the classroom. The ability to read students' emotions is both unimportant and eerily disturbing. The FACS has many benefits, such as recognizing emotions in art and creating virtual expressive faces, but none of these can be applied to the classroom.