Watched the 2009 Star Trek movie again recently and loved this part where Sulu has an embarrassing moment. I love the look on his face when Spock alerts him to it. Come on, we've all been there - not the being corrected by Spock bit but the generally doing something daft bit. The actor who plays Sulu has the most wonderful expression on his face. Of course his failure to disengage the external initial dampener (I had to go back to the clip a few times to get that right), ultimately saved them from being destroyed by Romulans. Failures can sometimes lead to great things.
It's a cool way of depicting what it is to be human in a futuristic setting. It would be awful if we lost that.
Chris Clay took a day of PD for our Teacher only day. He certainly gave us a lot to think on. One idea Chris talked about was what we could do as teachers that robots would not be able to. An interesting question as AI in the future may lead to robots that are able to synthesise the human condition.
Perhaps though our strength is in our failures and being able to laugh at them and learn from them - not always straight away though!
If Sulu had been a robot he would not have made the error and they would all have perished.
Teachers would hopefully not have a scenario as dramatic as this one but redefining failure with their students, making it part of a positive process rather than the end of the world, would be a wonderful achievement I think. It's one that we as humans are certainly capable of.
