I was curious about whether there have been film representations of cyborgs as teachers, so I decided to google cyborg teacher. Of course, what I got was a wild array! The first link I clicked was for a real stinker of a movie, Class of 1999, in which cyborg teachers have been placed in "out of control" schools, to whip the attitudinal teens back into shape. Stacy Keach has, like, no eyes. Malcolm McDowell is uber scary. One of my favorite scenes is when the new "teachers" scan the students, and the audience views the readouts on how many gang members are in the crowd in front of the school. It's an interesting dilemma: the school really does have a gang problem; the cyborgs make it better at first, and then...the school has a cyborg problem. There is sadly a second movie, Class of 1999 2: The Substitute. One of the cyborg teachers from the first film comes back...and once again, substitutes get a really really bad rap.
So the first version of cyborg teachers is aimed at the classic issue of classroom discipline, and imports the basic RoboCop logic. Society, and the soft nonaugmented humans who make it up, has failed; kids are in gangs and anarchy is loosed upon the blackboard jungle world. There is no pretense of learning; it is simply a struggle to see which war lord will control the mostly terrified students.
Of course novels and films about the problems schools face with violent students is an old story (see Blackboard Jungle among many takes). And of course there is the classic 1980s Reagan era solution to all problems like this: terrorists? Columbine? Just get a cyborg superhero, or a truly heroic American on steroids, to take on these shitheads and beat sense into them (or the life out of them).
But I'm struck by the 1990ness of these images. Cities, public schools, the world has somehow all been taken over; the people who used to run things are now victims, and the erstwhile victims are now aggressors. But the people who used to run things (read: white middle class filmgoers and voters) have a (literal) new weapon: technology. Technology can help them regain control, and control, it turns out, is what it (school, urban life, geopolitics) is all about.
Today, as the U.S. government teeters on debt failure, a crisis completely designed and constructed by ideologues intent on making good all those rabid right wing radio ideas...I consider how to teach, what to teach, to my students in the fall. In a way, I want them to be competent cyborgs in a world where media representations outnumber actual representations.
Here is another site dedicated to cyborg teacher:
The classroom is itself a technology that I would argue is a virtual space, designed, organized, enclosed, no different than a space comprised of bytes; the classroom is a part of a larger education system whose parts are cooected to every aspect of American culture: home to road. The teacher and the student walk “into” the classroom from some other place and erect the theater of the system as they go about their business. The teacher stands at the front of the room, the student sits, listens, and writes notes. If a student leaves the room, he or she will walk down the hall and look into other “rooms” in which others are pretty much doing the same.
This illustration of the cyborg is mearly a test, a hypothesis, a means of seeing, not meant to be factual. It’s meant to be pleasant, perhaps a distraction; it’s meant to invite a game into the picture: to create learning spaces just as virtual as the classroom. What is this learning space: Interactive Fiction, of course.
http://www.steveersinghaus.com/archives/294
That is, the face to face classroom according to Steve Ersinghaus might be fruitfully reimagined as a place where people are partly somewhere else (as in my online course) but also synchronically linked (that is, in that virtual place at the same time).
The cyborg teacher as cyborg enforcer looks at students from the point of view of enemies, of uncontrollable violence animals with a patina of humanity. The cyborg teacher as teacher of cyborgs imagines that the students are always already partly elsewhere, with different goals and priorities, and that a good deal of what modern teachers teach is how to think through things over time with some degree of time commitment and focus.
Sometimes I think that given our media saturated and information-centrifugal world, everyone in the US is ADD. Learning to attend - not attend as be in your seat, but to attend to what is being offered as learning, to attend to one's own priorities and skills - turns out to be a massively cyborgian task.
About one month to go on this sabbatical, and I'm getting ready to dive back in to this task. I can imagine a prompt that asks students to "read" classrooms, and teachers, and what combinations are best for learning. I want my students to use social media to connect with other people, students and otherwise, to produce real knowledge, to join forces and collaborate on real problems.
