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

to
feel
and what you were going to do to help them have the opportunity to do so? Could you plan a maths lessonthat had opportunity for ‘serenity’ (although, maybe not too serene – remember, counting sheep can count as numeracy)? A DT lesson that has space for ‘joy’? A PE theory lesson that had space for ‘gratitude’, and not just at the end?
    Of course, there are no such things as positive, or indeed negative, emotions. There are just emotions and our individual responses to them. Like fun, they will mean different things to different people and one person’s pride may be another person’s arrogance. (The way to spot the difference, I was once told, between an arrogant person and a confident person is that the former makes you feel worse about yourself and the latter makes you feel better about yourself. Easy really.)
    The emotions I recommend when I’m working with teachers usually include the following: 1
    Novelty:
Remember, ‘it’s the brain stupid’. The human brain, ‘kludge’ that it is in David Linden’s words, can’t make its mind up for itself. While on the one hand the reptilian brain seeks routine, predictability and the sense of safety such sameness brings, higher parts of the brain crave novelty and unpredictability, especially in the young brain. The Von Restorff Effect 2 decrees that if something stands out as being novel and in stark contrast to what is around it in either time or place, it makes it more memorable. (Our friends at Wikipedia also refer to this as the ‘isolation effect’ and throw in the ‘serial position effect’, the ‘humor effect’ and the ‘bizarreness effect’ for good measure.)
    Suspense:
‘Coming up after the break …’. In broadcast terms this is called ‘throwing forward’ and it is a very clever way of holding people’s attention and creating a sense of suspense. Similarly, setting the learning outcome as, ‘Today we are going to learn the structure of the sonnet’ would have a very different effect if you phrased it as, ‘Today we are going to learn how to win the man or woman of your dreams in just 14 lines’.
    Winning:
Some of the most tedious moments of my life have been on a primary school playing field watching my children’s non-competitive sports days. According to Judith Rich Harris, author of
No Two Alike: Human Nature and Human Individuality
, children use three different ‘systems of the mind’ for carrying out three main social tasks they are faced with during childhood, namely a ‘relationship system’ for getting on with people, a ‘socialization system’ for fitting in and a ‘status system’ for competing. ‘Children want to conform
and
compete’, she says (Rich Harris 2007). Winning and losing is part of life so get over it and learn how to compete 3 (as well as how to collaborate) and learn how to win andwin graciously and positively whilst enjoying all the feel-good feelings that come with knowing you have achieved something special through your hard work and effort.
    Losing:
See above. If you don’t know how to lose you don’t know how to play.
    Pathos:
Although not every scientist agrees, there is a growing body of knowledge to show that we have ‘mirror neurons’, that the parts of our brain that we use to experience our own emotions such as happiness, sadness or disgust, are actually activated by watching someone else experience those emotions. Feeling sorry for someone may be one thing – sympathy – but helping young people fire up parts of the brain that will help them actually feel like what it is like to be someone else – empathy – takes their learning to a whole new level. Especially when you remember the key role that emotion plays in the learning brain. I once observed a history lesson on the capture, transportation, auctioning, torture, punishment and murder of Black African slaves. It was a perfectly satisfactory multisensory, fully VAK-ed lesson. Yet I left with a huge sense of unease and anger. How can you have a lesson where the torture and castration of human beings is treated in the same way as you would treat other historical ‘facts’ such as the dates of the Franco-Prussian War or factors surrounding American Independence? There was a whole emotional level to the learning that the teacher simply ignored, something I found pedagogically, not to mention morally, wrong.
    Curiosity:
In 2005, I led a three-month circumnavigation of the British Isles on the back of this one