EXPOSED
Much of this job — writing lecture slides, building syllabi, drafting quiz banks, grading short-answer work, summarizing nutrition or child-development literature — is already within reach of current AI. What holds is the hands-on tier: supervising foods labs and test kitchens, teaching sewing and textiles technique, running practicum placements in childcare centers and dietetics sites, and evaluating student performance in person. The bigger threat to this small occupation (about 2,800 jobs) is program consolidation and adjunctification, not a model replacing the instructor.
Mixed — a routine tier and a judgment tier. An 11 reflects the split inside a single course: the nutrition-science lecture, the reading list, the rubric, and the online discussion prompts can be generated and graded by a model today, but nobody can watch a student debone a chicken, judge whether a seam allowance is even, or catch a food-safety violation at a steam table through a screen — and that lab tier is roughly half the contact hours in foods, textiles, and child-development practica.
Some physical or field component. At 12 you are in a test kitchen with commercial ranges and a serving line, at sewing and pressing stations, and out doing site visits to childcare centers and dietetics placements — real physical presence in spaces you don't control — but you are not scoring higher because the semester still runs on a classroom, an LMS gradebook, and department meetings rather than continuous fieldwork.
No licence, no signature requirement. A 4 is right because a postsecondary teaching appointment requires no practice licence: the master's or doctorate and any ServSafe or RD credential you hold are hiring criteria and program-accreditation inputs (AAFCS, ACEND), not a legal barrier — the institution carries the liability for what happens in your lab, and an adjunct with a different credential mix can be hired into your section next term.
The human relationship is the product. 15 is earned in the practicum and advising relationship — you are the one who signs off that a student is ready to stand in front of preschoolers or in a hospital diet office, you write the reference that placement supervisors actually read, and you know which student panics under a timed lab — but it stops short of the top band because students enroll for the degree and the licensure pathway, and the course is often filled by whichever faculty member is assigned it.
Meaningful discretion. 11 covers calls that are genuinely yours and genuinely contested — failing a student on professional conduct at a childcare site, deciding whether a food-safety lapse is teachable or removable, handling a mandated-reporter disclosure that surfaces in a child-development practicum — but curriculum content, competency lists, and grade appeals are bounded by accreditor standards and departmental policy rather than left to you.
Has AI actually changed your work?