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

the greater independence of her pupils.
    Which brings me back to where I started this chapter. Do you believe your job is to teach children or help them to learn? Do you believe your school is – or should be – a teaching school or a learning school?
    Your answer changes everything.

Chapter 22
Things that get in the way of the learning that are nothing to do with the teaching
    Although I wouldn’t like to argue with Dr Andrew Curran when he says that the most important thing in the classroom is the teacher, there are plenty of factors that can interfere with students’ ability to learn that have got very little do with you. Although, once you are aware of them, you can start to accommodate them in the way you plan not only your lessons but also your classroom and even your entire day.
    Lighting is one of my favourite examples. As I stated in
Essential Motivation
, on the subject of fluorescent strip lighting:
    Apart from not containing the full light spectrum that our brains need, they also flash on and off around 100 times a second, inducing in us ‘stress type’ levels of the hormones cortisol and ACTH … In a relaxed state the brain is processing information at about five to ten times per second, which can be multiplied by 20 during prolonged exposure to fluorescent lights.
    (Gilbert 2002)
    According to one website 1 I have found since writing these words, the range of hazards that fluorescent lights expose us to include:
    Headache, eyestrain, eye irritation, fatigue, difficulty in concentration, increased rate of ‘misjudgments’ and accidents, malaise and irritability caused by noise, glare and flicker from fluorescent lighting, increased stress (which may in turn lead to heart disease), changes in hormone production, allergic skin reactions and dermatitis, ‘cutaneous light sensitivity’, increased risk of seizure in epilepsy sufferers, higher incidence of miscarriage and the speeding up the aging of the retina.
    Although it’s probably worth pointing out that the website in question belongs to the
Natural Lighting Company
in Glendale, Arizona, it does resonate with findings I have come across elsewhere.
    It’s not just the type of lighting that is at question though, it is also the nature of the lighting, according to seminal research by Dr Rita and Dr Kenneth Dunn and detailed in their book
Teaching Students Through Their Individual Learning Styles
. (I know there is a great deal of controversy thrown up by the idea of ‘learning styles’ but think of it rather as what I call a ‘learning mix’–the variety of factors that will ensure we learn as best as we can at any given time.) The best way to think about this learning mix is to consider it from your own perspective as a learner. So, starting with lighting, are you a one little lamp above your desk with the rest of the room in darkness sort of learner or a whole house lit up while you do your marking type? Or maybe you prefer natural lighting anyway? What about candlelight in your classroom? I know the Elfin Safety has a seizure when you use the words ‘candle’ and ‘classroom’ in the same breath but there is a world of difference between reading, for example,
The Canterbury Ghost
in candlelight with the blinds drawn and reading it under the uncompromising glare of a bank of fluorescent lights. I know because some schools do it that way.
    And what about being outside to learn? Do you remember the ‘environment of evolutionary adaptedness’ from chapter 8 ? The idea that we are like we are because of the millions of years we’ve spent doing other things. Well, we’ve spent millions of years under (a) full spectrum, (b) natural lighting in (c) a green environment. That’s what we are ‘designed’ for. Classrooms usually fall down on all three counts. On the subject of the green environment, there is plenty of research about how beneficial that is to us too. In a report entitled ‘Nearby Nature: A Buffer of Life Stress Among Rural Children’, the researchers found that having access to green environments reduced stress levels for children, regardless of what the stress was, compared to those who didn’t have access to such environments. Further research from the Landscape and Human Health Laboratory at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has found a remarkable range of benefits of proximity to green environments including the discoveries that working in a green environment reduces symptoms in children with ADHD, that