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

part of the brain that doesn’t doreason. And you’re trying to use language on a part of the brain that doesn’t do language. By taking the student away from the perceived – or real – threat and by engaging him or her in a distracting activity you are giving the brain the time and space it needs to re-balance itself at a neuro-chemical level. And the fact that he engaged the students in a physical activity meant that, as we have seen, he was also tapping into the cerebellum’s dual ability to help us both move and think in a balanced and, quite literally, level-headed way.
    If we punish a child when their amygdala is aroused it is seen as another attack. If we punish them when our amygdala is aroused, it is an act of vengeance. Punishment should never be emotionally driven. It should be a simple process of ‘cause and effect’, clearly demarked. If you do this, this is what will happen.
    Sometimes in the classroom our interventions make a bad situation worse. We match their state with a similar one of our own and the whole thing can degenerate into an ever-escalating ‘Well, you said that!’, ‘Well you did that!’ war of attrition that is, at the end of the day, two lizards shouting at each other. We need to model the emotionally intelligent STAR approach ourselves. Nipping such a situation in the bud by saying, ‘Look, this is getting us nowhere. I’m going to walk over here and breathe and have a think about things and I suggest you do the same and then we’ll talk to each other again at the end of the lesson and work out what we are going to do.’ While I know this can be hard at times, especially when we are at the mercy of our own amygdalae, the ability to model emotionally intelligent behaviour is one of the most important things you can do for young people. Remember, they may never have seen an emotionally intelligent adult before.
    On those occasions when you do lose it completely, afterwards you say ‘Sorry’. And remember, ‘sorry’ is a word that should always be followed by a full stop. Not ‘Sorry, but … if you hadn’t done this or that!’ Just ‘I’m sorry. Will you forgive me so we can move on?’
    After all, if we want children to grow up then we must be grown up too.

Chapter 14
Teacher’s little helper
    There has been a great deal written about the neurotransmitter 1 dopamine 2 in recent years, much of it because of the part it plays – or the lack of it plays – in diseases such as depression and Parkinson’s. But in the classroom, dopamine means the difference between the class learning and not learning, between them remembering what they learned and forgetting it before the bell goes, between them behaving and applying themselves or causing chaos. It is dopamine that even decides how well those critical first few minutes of lesson go.
    If teaching is about creating the right neurochemical cocktail, then dopamine is the tequila in the twenty-first century teacher’s margarita.
    As you know, the brain ‘works’ by sending signals between brain cells. To do this the brain employs neurotransmitters that relay, amplify and modulate signals between a neuron and another cell. There are a range of such neurotransmitters such as noradrenaline and epinephrine which are linked to stress and ‘fight or flight’ response, melatonin 3 which promotes sleepiness and is known as the ‘hormone of darkness’ and serotonin which regulates mood among other things and is a key element in our fight against depression (hence the SSRI or ‘selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor’ family of antidepressant drugs such as Prozac).
    Dopamine, or C 6 H 3 (OH) 2 -CH 2 -CH 2 -NH 2 as it is known to people in the know, is a naturally occurring chemical in the brain that has an important role in our thinking, movement, motivation, reward, sleep, mood attention, physical growth, sexual development and learning. It even has a part to play in why bananas go brown.
    Bananas aside, as they like to say on the Windward Isles, when just the right amount of dopamine is released at just the right time in just the right way the neurological consequence is learning. Dopamine is the principal ‘synaptogenic’ chemical in the brain, followed closely by glutamate, another key neurotransmitter linked to learning and memory. In other words, it is the number one chemical when it comes to laying downnew pathways, building new templates and learning – and remembering – new things. As Dr Curran points