Why Do I Need a Teacher When I’ve Got Google

of music. Whereas we tend to associate listening to music with the right brain, studies have shown that trained musicians use their left brain to appreciate music when listening to it. A study in the
Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine
refers to such research as a ‘hotly debated topic’ and, in describing some of this research, concludes by saying: ‘A point to note is that, for musicians, mere passive listening is more difficult because of their spontaneous analytical processing, and this possibly contributes to the left lateralization.’ 3 , 4
    Where does that leave the teacher about to go into a history classroom and engage the ‘whole brains’ of 30 14-year-olds? Well, if you look at the traditional (but not accurate) demarcation of what both hemispheres were up to – left brain was words and sequences and analysis and right brain was the big picture and colour and shapes and rhythm and movement – just make sure you are doing
all
of it. So, where you have wordsmake sure you have pictures too, where you have black and white make sure you have colour, where you have discussion make sure you have music, where you have stillness make sure you have movement too, you get the picture … .
    While we’re on the subject of false ‘facts’ we know about the brain, here are a few more that I have come across on my travels in schools, as debunked by, of all people, the OECD and their Centre for Educational Research and Innovation.
    We only use ten per cent of our brains 5
    No we don’t, we use a lot of our brains a lot of the time, even when we’re asleep. This idea, unattributably attributed to Einstein amongst others, may well have come out of a self-help book from the US on how to improve your memory from the nineteenth century. It just simply isn’t true. As the good people of OECD state categorically:
    All existing data shows that we use a 100% of our brains.
    ( www.oecd.org/document/23/0,3343,en_2649_35845581_33831575_1_1_1_1,00.html )
    When you start talking about the brain’s
potential
though, now you’re onto something. Brain ‘plasticity’ relates to the extent to which we can grow our brain, not in size, but in the way it is wired up. As we learn we make new connections, the more connections we make, the more we can go on to make. In other words the more we use it, the more we can use it. Stands to reason in an exponential way. But simply having plenty of connections doesn’t necessarily make us cleverer. As John T. Bruer, president of the James S. McDonnell Foundation, 6 , 7 says in his article
Neural Connections: Some You Use, Some You Lose
, ‘despite what we read in the papers, the neuroscientific evidence does not support the claim that the more connections you have, the smarter you are.’ What we are talking about is the brain’s capacity for growth. Don’t tell me you can’t sing, draw, rock climb, write a poem, bake a soufflé, do Soduku. Just tell me you can’t do those things
yet
. And, what then, is the potential of our brains? My favourite estimate is that there are more potential connections in a single human brain than there are atoms in the visible universe (for which the number has been calculated as ten to the 80th power 8 ). But this is not infinite as some self-help gurus would have us believe. According to Dr Curran, there is a genetic limit to our potential, the thing is we don’t know where it is. So, how high is high? We can’t all sing like Pavarotti sang, but we can all sing better than we have done up to now. To achievethis we need to go through a three-step process. We need to have the desire to sing better. We need to believe we can sing better (and put to bed the ‘I can’t sing’ myth). Then we need to do something different from what we did before when we failed, which usually means not going back to that music teacher who made you mime in the school choir because you were putting the pianist off. When I was teaching French we had ‘C/D borderline’ students back after school in their own time and we, basically, gave them more of the same. What did this change? It made them
better
C/D borderline students. As the saying goes, you’ll get what you got if you do what you did. We, like many schools and governments seem to do, overlooked the first two steps.
    There is a ‘critical’ window of opportunity to stimulate and enrich the brain, up to the age of three that will have an effect on an individual’s success in later life
    I meet teachers