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

by Sheryl Feinstein in
Secrets of the Teenage Brain
indicating that ‘the majority of high school students were sleep deprived resulting in 20 per cent of high school students falling asleep in school’. She goes on to add that ‘Research studies show that high school students not receiving enough sleep suffer in grades and overall school success’ (Feinstein 2004). A more disturbing side to the teenager’s irregular sleep patterns was highlighted by research that found that going to bed after ten o’clock at night led to a 24 per cent increase in depression in people aged between12 and 18. 4 They were also 20 per cent more likely to experience ‘suicidal thoughts’. Furthermore, young people who had fewer than five hours’ sleep were 71 per cent more likely to become depressed.
    What can schools do about this? In an article in
The Independent
, Professor Dirk-Jan Dijk, director of the Surrey Sleep Research Centre said, ‘There is something to be said for the idea that making school schedules fit in with adolescents’ natural rhythms would make youngsters more productive.’ 5 Such insights have encouraged some schools in the UK to use their new-found flexibility with the timetable to start lessons later in the day and finish later in the evening to fit around the adolescent brain a whole lot better. Where this has been adopted in the US, it has been shown to raise achievement. Most schools, however, still operate the traditional system of making young people arrive at 8.30 even though they don’t wake up until 11.
    As with all educational innovations, though, such an idea comes up against the
Daily Mail
who reported the story under the headline ‘School trials 10am starts “to give tired pupils a lie-in”’. 6 Here they quote Ruth Lea, an economic advisor to an unnamed banking group and former head of policy at the Institute of Directors, who ‘branded’ the idea as ‘fatuous’, saying, ‘If teenagers need nine-and-a-half hours sleep, they should go to bed earlier.’ Yet, as Feinstein points out, citing research on tired and underachieving adolescents, ‘forcing them to bed earlier did not solve the problem’.
    Perhaps one day we’ll stop bankers and journalists from setting educational policy. Although it could be worse. We could just leave it to politicians.
    Talking of politicians, let us continue our exploration of the teenage brain by considering a species of spineless bottom feeder known as a sea squirt.
    Known colloquially to East Coast fishermen as a ‘pisser’–for obvious reasons if you have ever squeezed one (a sea squirt that is, not an East Coast fisherman) – the sea squirt is a member of the tunicate family 7 and has a life cycle that goes something along the lines of (1) drift around for a while as a larva, (2) find a rock and attach itself to grow into an adult and (3) never, ever move again. Because of that it is has been shown to digest its own cerebral ganglion, effectively the primitive brain that deals with movement. In other words, because it no longer moves at all, it eats its own brain. Some of the boys do that during year nine.
    Movement and learning go together and strapping young people down for hours on end to uncomfortable chairs is all about teaching and control and nothing about learning. Not only that, by helping them develop their motor skills you are actually enhancing the part of the brain that deals with coordinating thinking too. Why? Because both skills employ the same part of the brain, the cerebellum. 8
    Touch your nape and you are only centimetres away from this cauliflower-looking primitive part of the brain, that is packed with more neurons than, according to some sources, the rest of the brain put together. In the same way that it helps with balance and posture, it also aids thinking and reasoning by keeping us on task, organized and, effectively, balanced. And, according to Feinstein again, ‘the more complicated a task facing us, the larger the role the cerebellum plays in resolving it’. It is also linked to reading, although the understanding of the words part is performed elsewhere, and even song lyrics and lines from films are stored there. I once met a teacher who used to let her ‘remedial’ children walk up and down in the primary school hall whilst reading as it ‘seemed to help them’. Another example was the primary head who saw a significant increase in the achievement of her ‘naughty boys’ in reading after they had had