in Disruptive Fixation when discussing the New School in NYC’s goal of using industry partnerships to create a new class of worker with digital and technological flexibility. I believed that an introduction to something technical, tactile, and ‘fun’ like a smartboard would be the key to creating “productive” members of society: or, as Dyer-Witheford called it in Cyber- Proletariat, a new caste of exploitable worker with digital competencies and learning capabilities that can easily pick up new technologies. We went over how to change colors of pens, how to use the desktop and pull programs up, and how to drag pictures from the desktop to the top layer of whatever you were working on. This is all we were trained to do with the boards, and in rewatching the video I linked above, I couldn’t tell you how to do 80% of what those teachers did. When we pointed out that there were missing functionalities linked to proprietary support programs like the ones in the video above, a superior informed us that the package the district chose did not include lesson-plans, study aids, etc. from the company itself, and that the district would be working on its own content. That content was not delivered in the three years I was employed for the district. With the implementation of these boards, a memo was sent out from the superintendent’s office extolling the values of technologizing the lesson-making and lesson-delivery process with these boards and how important multimodal and technologized lesson delivery was to the success of the district. The memo also mentioned that use of technology would now be graded criteria in teacher evaluations. I realize now what an inordinate amount of pressure this one example of technologization put on a vast range of teachers and students: my mother, whose pedagogy had, to that point, been facilitated on whiteboards and never “went down” due to technological malfunctions; young teachers that she peer mentored that didn’t learn in college how to implement technology into lesson plans; students who lost out on instructional time due to technological malfunction; students who did not have the technological competencies that were expected of them to succeed with these technologies. This was but one example from my time working in this district where technology was rushed, no support was given to the support staff, then the technology was pushed onto the teachers with less training than we received.

## If You Die in the Game, You Die for Real

In addition to over-technologization, the district began pushing games-based pedagogy harder and harder, making the case that technology and games are logical compliments, and that learners in today’s classrooms have fundamentally different learning styles than learners 20 years ago. Therefore, games-based pedagogy made sense to them because current students tend to spend more time with videogames and on screens of some sort than learners did 20 years ago. What doesn’t make sense is to assume every student in the district has the same technological proficiency or access to technology. Technological proficiency and skill sets vary vastly from the higher-end socioeconomic schools in this district to the lower socioeconomic schools like the one I worked for; students may or may not have access to iPads, game consoles, or home computers that games-based pedagogy mimics and tries to recreate in the classroom.