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

girls living in apartments with ‘greener, more natural views’ had higher self-esteem scores compared to those living in ‘more barren but otherwise identical housing’, that women who live in apartment buildings ‘with trees and greenery immediately outside report greater effectiveness and less procrastination in dealing with their major life issues than those living in barren but otherwise identical buildings’, that there were 48 per cent fewer instances of crime against property and 56 per cent fewer instances of violent crime in apartment buildings bordered by trees and greenery than in identical apartments nearby surrounded by ‘barren land’, that the greenness of the surroundings correlated in inverse proportionwith the number of crimes, in other words that more trees = less crime, that women living in apartment buildings with trees and greenery ‘immediately outside’ committed fewer ‘aggressive and violent acts against their partners’ than those in ‘barren but otherwise identical buildings’ and that the women living in the green surroundings used a ‘smaller range of aggressive tactics during their lifetime against their partner’. 2 Green spaces have also been associated with quicker post-operative recovery periods and, if you leave work stressed, you are more likely to be less stressed when you arrive back home if you have travelled through a green environment than if you have headed home though a built-up environment.
    I bet the Local Authority didn’t think about that when it sold off your school fields.
    One teacher told me how she had a group of boys in her class who were behaving in typical ‘boy-like’ ways so as an experiment she moved all of the boys closer to the window for several lessons. To her surprise their behaviour improved, only to deteriorate when she moved them back to their original places a few weeks later. Another lady, a special needs teacher, once told me about a boy she had been working with outside a classroom and who was working well. On his return to the classroom things only started to deteriorate when the teacher switched the classroom lights on at which point the special needs teacher had to practically drag the boy from the classroom. When she asked him why his behaviour had changed so abruptly his reply was, ‘Those lights, Miss! They do my head in.’ I also once read an article claiming that raised levels of cortisol caused by these lights lead to weight gain and diabetes under the title, ‘Fluorescent Lights Make You Fat’!
    What opportunities then do you have in your classroom to experiment with the quality of the lighting? To have lights off more often or, maybe, half the lights on or half the lights off? Or even go outside to learn, heaven forbid?! And never underestimate the powerful effect light can have on our overall state. To quote the great Italian film director Frederico Fellini:
    Light is everything; substance, dreams, feelings, style, colour, tone, depth, atmosphere, narrative, ideology. Light is life.
    ( www.iguzzini.com )
    Another factor from the Dunn and Dunn learning mix is eating and/or drinking whilst learning. When you are at home working on your own do you make sure, before you start, you’ve got your cup of coffee or glass of wine? Some people are ‘nibblers’, eating and drinking whilst learning. Others would rather save their intake for the breaks, even using the promise of a cup of tea and a Hobnob as motivation to keep going for that extra20 minutes of effort. Regardless of your school rules, eating and drinking in the classroom or not
will
have an effect on your students’ learning.
    Or what about how you position yourself when you are working? Do you sit at a desk or table or do you regularly lie on the floor to work? Maybe you sprawl half on a settee, half on the floor but all over the place? Maybe you will vary the position you take depending on the nature of the work you are about to undertake?
    In most classrooms, however, the rules are ‘sit at your desk to read’, ‘sit at your desk to listen’, ‘sit at your desk to write’, ‘sit at your desk to think’, interspersed with the occasional ‘stand behind your desk to feign respect’. Does it have to be that way? One of the things I have picked up during my time observing lessons is that chairs and tables are often used in the classroom for crowd-control purposes, acting like groynes to stop the long-shore drift of children to the windows. Sometimes