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

it is the layout of the room that causes the restlessness in the children in the first place. I remember observing a class of inner-city year ten students in a drama lesson and then, immediately after, in a history lesson. In the former the children were impeccably behaved as they wandered the dark spaces of the drama studio, sometimes sitting on the floor, sometimes in a semi-circle of chairs. In the latter, squashed into a small room made smaller by heavy classroom tables and chairs and the equally cumbersome attitude of the teacher, they were listless and troublesome. Even when a teacher does want to offer a little variety in the way they teach, they often feel that the bulky classroom tables mitigate against it, although it does seem odd to let the furniture determine the pedagogy. It really doesn’t take that long for 30 children to move 15 tables to the sides of the rooms and make a circle of 30 chairs. My best time has been 58 seconds. And then the same amount of time to put things back how they were at the end of the lesson.
    Would, then, you be prepared to allow,
in a managed and professional way
, children to lie on the floor to work in your classroom? One teacher I talked to about this said that in her class she had a couple of boys who refused to read until she offered them the chance to read whilst sitting under the table. Or what about allowing children to walk up and down as they read? I came across research many years back that found that children who were allowed to walk around as they read, learned better than if they had been sitting down to read. Remember the role that the cerebellum plays in both movement and reading? Or what about allowing your students to simply stand up to work? Ernest Hemmingway, Virginia Woolf, Winston Churchill, Vladimir Nabokov, Thomas Wolfe, Leonardo da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Napoleon, William Gladstone and Donald Rumsfeld all wrote standing up. 3 But then, why should we be so surprised? We’ve been standing or lying for millions of years. Sitting downat a table and desk is a very new phenomenon that restricts our ability to take the sort of deep breaths we need to take to fire our brain with the oxygen it needs to create the 20 Watts or so of electricity it runs on and involves most of our body weight resting on about four square inches of bone for extended periods of time. 4 No wonder it is called a SAT. Remember what I said about Darwin and his ‘thinking walks’ in chapter 11 . In
Re-Imagine
, Tom Peters quotes the designer Niels Diffrient, when he says:
    My ideal office wouldn’t have a chair. You would do two things: stand up or lie down. These are the body’s most natural positions. 5
    (Peters 2003)
    So, what variety is available to your students when it comes to how they position themselves for learning in your classroom? And what about your own position in the classroom? According to an article on the ‘360-degree classroom’ in
The Observer
, ‘Consigning the teacher to a desk at the front is thought to stop him or her thinking freely.’ 6
    Another factor identified by Dunn and Dunn is the time of day. Are you an early bird or a night owl? Do you fire on all four cylinders best during period one or period six? Are you at your most creative at midday or midnight? Your answer to these questions will reveal what is known as your genetically determined ‘chronotype’ and it is worth pointing out at this stage, for purposes of your own safety, that working contrary to your chronotype can kill you. Literally. Research found that early birds working nights, for example, had particularly high incidents of serious illnesses, including cancer. On a different, but still important, note it has been suggested that teachers on average have a preference for mornings whereas children, certainly at adolescent stage, have a preference for afternoons. There has also been shown to be a 12-hour spread in the population’s ‘chronotype’ meaning that one person’s early breakfast is another person’s light supper. What’s more, this ‘social jet lag’, 7 as it has been called, even seems to lead to an increased risk of taking up smoking with all the associated dangers that brings.
    Do you work to your chronotype or theirs? Research at the University of Toronto has shown people can drop on average six or seven points in intelligence tests if they sit the test at what is, for them at least, the ‘wrong’ time of the day. 8 Do you cover that