EXPOSED
The classroom hour — live conversation practice, error correction with cultural context, seminar discussion of literature — still needs a person, and students pay for the cohort and the mentor. But the surrounding work (drafting syllabi and lesson plans, building vocabulary and grammar drills, generating reading glosses, grading translation exercises and short compositions, writing feedback) is exactly what LLMs do well, and free machine translation has already gutted the instrumental case for enrolling in a language sequence. The near-term threat to this occupation is not an AI teaching Spanish 201 — it is deans closing under-enrolled language departments, which is already happening.
Mixed — a routine tier and a judgment tier. Roughly half your week resists automation — the Spanish 201 conversation hour, correcting a student's aspect error while explaining why a Mexican speaker would phrase it differently, running a seminar on Rulfo where the point is the argument between students — but the other half (syllabus revision, drill and quiz banks, vocabulary lists, glossing readings, marking short compositions and translation sets, and writing the paragraph of feedback at the bottom) is now first-draftable in minutes, which is what pins this at 9 rather than the 14+ of a role whose outputs can't be prompted.
Some physical or field component. You are in a room with bodies — modelling pronunciation and mouth position, reading the confusion on a face mid-drill, chaperoning the study-abroad term or the conversation table over dinner — but nothing you do requires a truck, a lab bench, or a hard hat, and the pandemic proved the course can be delivered over Zoom at real cost rather than total failure, which is what keeps this at 7 instead of 13.
No licence, no signature requirement. No state licence gates postsecondary language instruction: a department can staff Elementary French with an adjunct, a graduate TA, or a native-speaker lecturer holding an MA, and the PhD is a hiring credential your dean can waive, not a statute that requires a named human to sign off on your students' credit hours — hence 2 rather than the 11+ of professions where deregistration ends the career.
The human relationship is the product. Students pick your section, come back for the 300-level because of you, ask you for the letter of recommendation to the Fulbright, and take a language largely because a specific instructor made the cohort worth showing up to — that relationship is genuinely the product at 13, but it stops short of the high teens because enrolment is mostly driven by degree requirements and scheduling, and a department can substitute another instructor between terms without students walking away.
Meaningful discretion. You make real calls with consequences — placement and proficiency-level decisions, whether a suspiciously fluent essay is DeepL and therefore an academic-integrity referral, what to cut from a canon under a 14-week cap, grades that affect scholarships — but you make them inside departmental rubrics, common finals, and an appeals process where the chair and the dean own the final ruling, which is a 9 and not the 15 of someone whose signature is the last one on the file.
Has AI actually changed your work?