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

and, thirdly, ‘blocking’, an example of which is the tip of the tongue syndrome you experience at parents evening with the name of that child whose parents are sitting expectantly in front of you – being ‘sins of omission’ (Schacter 1999). The last four –‘suggestibility’ where you can be tricked into registering false memories through things like leading questions; ‘bias’ where the way you feel now can alter the way you remember events from the past (remember how wonderful and free teaching used to be under the Tories?); ‘persistence’ as seen in the recurring unwanted memories experienced in post-traumatic stress disorder; and ‘misattribution’ where you ‘remember’ experiencing something that didn’t happen (remember how wonderful and free teaching used to be under the Tories?) – are ‘sins of commission’.
    So, although our memories are fallible, they are still good enough to
never
be the problem when it comes to passing exams. In other words, forgetting to remember to pass the exam is an unforgivable way to fail given all that we know about remembering.
    One of the most useful ways to look at memory is with the following equation:
    RRR+R
    At the risk of making you sound like a pirate if you happen to be reading this book out loud, our first three Rs are:
    Registration – taking the information on board in the first place
Retention – hanging onto it when it is in there
Recall – bringing it back out, preferably as and when you need it.
    For the purposes of the classroom, and the ‘seven sins’ notwithstanding, we can assume that the middle ‘R’ is not a problem and our learners are capable of retaining what they have learned. In a nutshell, then, the secret of having great recall, to be able to pluck from inside your own head the information you need as and when you want it, is based on the strength of the first ‘R’. In other words, the better the registration, the better the recall. And the secret of effective registration?
    If you can see it, you can remember it.
    On the whole, and this is especially true for children, we have lousy memories for abstract concepts. As St Thomas Aquinas said, ‘Man’s mind cannot understand thoughts without the image of them.’ But when we ‘concretize’ things, turn them into something we can see, even if only in our heads, then it makes them far more memorable. To what extent, then, do you expect your learners to remember things that they cannot see and how can you take these invisible ideas, ideas such as ‘regular verbs’, ‘policy of appeasement’ and ‘sodium permanganate’ (which I know is a ‘thing’ but try telling that to a dyslexic 11-year-old), and turn them into pictures in a child’s head?
    Once you have made the abstract concrete, you can then work not only to make the concepts memorable but also unforgettable. For example, if you make sure they are seeing the images in colour, this has been shown to improve our memories (Wichman, F.
et al
. 2002). Remember too, we have a better memory for colours than we do for words. Not only that, but when we colour coordinate memories it improves our ability to recall those memories. 2 Add to that the research that, when we picture things, if we include movement in that picture it makes it easier to recall. Similarly, if we include ourselves in this colourful moving image then that, too, improves recall. And then the fun really starts. Sex not only sells, it also aids recall. Introduce an element of sex or at least sexiness into the imagery (and remember, no-one needs to share their images with anyone else) then recall rates will soar, as will fun, although that is no coincidence either if you remember our brain lesson from chapter 15 – the part of our brain that deals with long-term memories is very closely linked to the part of our brain that deals with emotions in our limbic system. You remember your first time. And it doesn’t have to be just sex, as the actress said to the bishop. Things that are extreme make ideas unforgettable too, not to mention when things are weird, bizarre, funny and yucky. You remember your first time.
    When I was learning to become a language teacher, during my PGCE I became aware that I was learning to teach not ‘French’ but ‘rubbish’. Lumps of sound. What I called ‘phonic blobs’. Groups of phonemes that meant nothing to anyone who had never been to France, met a French person or who had any experience of Frenchness. If I