I am afraid that even asking this question would be perceived as horribly patriarchal today.
My parents' generation would probably say "cooking" and maybe a few more things, dunno.
Former teacher here. Like avancil said, education is organized by amateurs. Having it organized by non-teachers has its own risks (optimizing for legible goals, ignoring all tacit knowledge of teachers), but there should be some way to get best practices from other professions to teachers. Also, university education of teachers is horribly inadequate (at least at my school it was), and the on-job training is mostly letting the new guy sink or swim.
To handle multiple things, you need to keep notes. As a software developer, I just carry my notebook everywhere, and I have a note-keeping program (cherrytree) where I make a new node for each task. So if I was a teacher again, I would either do this, or a paper equivalent of it. (Maybe keep a notebook with one page per student. And one page per week, for short notes about things that need to be done that week. I would just start with something, and then adapt as needed.)
Yeah, the inability to take a bathroom break when you need it can be really bad. There should be a standard mechanism to call for help; just someone to come and take care of the class for 10 minutes. More generally, to call for assistance when needed; for example what would you do if a student got hurt somehow, and you need to find help, but you also cannot leave the class alone. (Schools sometimes offer a solution, which usually turns out to be completely inadequate, e.g. "call this specific person for help", and when you do, "sorry I am busy right now".) There should probably be a phone for that in the teachers' room, and someone specific should be assigned phone duty every moment between 8AM and 3PM, and it's their job to come no questions asked.
Debates about education are usually horribly asymmetric, because everyone had the experience of being a student, but many of them naively assume they know what it is like to be a teacher. Now you know the constraints the teachers work under; some of them are difficult to communicate. I think the task switching is exhausting in a way that is difficult to imagine if you haven't experienced it. (Could depend on personality, though. ADHD?) New things keep happening all day long, and you have no time to process them, because you keep switching tasks according to a predetermined schedule. For example, once I taught as a part-time job only one day a week, and it was a completely different experience -- I had enough time to prepare for the classes, and to reflect on them after the day. But try teaching 20+ classes a week, and it's like drowning in a river.
In software, network effects are strong. A solution people are already familiar with has an advantage. A solution integrated with other solutions you already use has an advantage (and it is easier to do the integration when both solutions are made by you). You can further lock the users in by e.g. creating a marketplace where people can sell plugins to your solution. Compared to all of this, things like "nice to use" remain merely wishes.
It could be an interesting experiment to build up this list iteratively. Like, every question you ask for the third time, the answer gets added at the bottom of the list. How long will the list get, and what will it contain?
Consider the pressures and incentives. Adding new features can help you sell the software to more users. Fixing bugs... unless the application is practically falling apart, it does not make much of a difference. After all, the bugs will only get noticed by people who already use your application, i.e. they already paid for it.
For the artificial intelligence, I assume the "killer app" will be its integration with SharePoint.
“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the Lord.
-- Isaiah 55:8
This probably also implies: "your values are not my values".
there is strong reluctance from employees to reveal that LLMs have boosted productivity and/or automated certain tasks.
The thing with "boosting productivity" is tricky, because productivity is not a linear thing. For example, in software development, using a new library can make adding new features faster (more functionality out of the box), but fixing bugs slower (more complexity involved, especially behind the scenes).
So what I would expect to happen is that there is a month or two with exceptionally few bugs, the team velocity is measured and announced as a new standard, deadlines are adjusted accordingly, then a few bugs happen and now you are under a lot more pressure than before.
Similarly, with LLMs it will be difficult to explain to non-technical management if they happen to be good at some kind of tasks, but worse at a different kind of tasks. Also, losing control... for some reasons that you do not understand, the LLM has a problem with the specific task that was assigned to you, and you are blamed for that.
I like this a lot! I think you did a great job explaining how the details are connected.
At the root, the problem is "we cannot teach everyone individually". We do not have enough teachers for that; and the computer solutions are not good enough yet. (Perhaps soon they will get good enough, at least in a way "everyone gets their own AI tutor, and there are still human teachers as a backup". But we are not there yet.) Many things that are unpleasant about schools were invented as a solution to "how to teach 300 kids using only 30 teachers, especially when most of them - both kids and teachers - are not very bright". The solutions seems like a local maximum (we already did many small improvements that worked in isolation), but it also seems like we could do much better with a greater redesign.
Another sad constraint is that many students would be unwilling to cooperate even with a much better designed system. Any solution needs to provide answers for what to do about students who will try their hardest to undermine the system, no matter how irrational such behavior may seem to us. Kids, especially at puberty, are often trying to impress their peers doing various destructive and self-destructive things. Assume that every school will have some bullies, some kids who want to hide in a place out of sight and use drugs, etc.
How can expectations exist without roles? When everyone is free to do whatever they want to, no one can expect anything specific...
Well, we can still have general, i.e. not gender-specific expectations, such as: people should be nice and emotionally mature. Nothing wrong with that. But it seems like the traditional gender roles also provided some gender-specific "hacks", and now we don't have them.
Or you could ask which traits are valued at the dating marketplace, or more specifically at the part you are interested in. But there is no general answer anymore; it depends on what you are looking for. For example, if you want to have a traditional relationship, it would make sense to behave according to the traditional roles, and expect the same from your potential partners. Other subcultures have different rules. And I suppose most people are confused, do random things, get random results, then hopefully learn and try something different.