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

(musical). As I said in chapter 21 , the doctor doesn’t just give you one chance at getting better. She will do whatever it takes until she finds what works for you. And, given what I have just been saying about letting children learn in ways you can’t, she doesn’t treat you for the ailments she’s got either. It is the same for the twenty-first century teacher who has such a variety of learning styles and strategies at her disposal.
    It is not in the nature of this particular book to give you a stack of activities and exercises relating to MI in the classroom. There are plenty of other books entirely dedicated to such an endeavour. My preferred way of using it for lesson planning is something that I also shared in
Essential Motivation
so I refer you there too. One strategy that I will share with you, though, as it is as simple as it is powerful, is an idea I developed I call
8Way Thinking
. This ‘polycognitive curiosity engine’, as I could call it, combines an all-encompassing MI approach to the world with the sorts of question-generating used in
P4C
.
    It came to me waiting for a bank manager in Ipswich, looking out from a soulless office block to one of the several derelict churches strewn across the town, this one beached in the middle of a roundabout surrounded by busy traffic and the odd tractor, what with this being Ipswich. I had had a conversation a few weeks prior to this with Gifted and Talented guru Dr David George in the back of a car travelling around the TT circuit on the Isle of Man and he explained how he used MI theory with group of G& T children to help them think about, for example, trees. He got them writing about trees, drawing trees, even listening to trees with a stethoscope. Generally, using all eight intelligences to explore what was around them.
8Way Thinking
grew out of thinking about David’s work, combined with my
P4C
experience mixed with the boredom of waiting for a bank manager in Suffolk.
    The way it works is embarrassingly simple yet how well it works is not to be sniffed at.
    I took Gardner’s eight intelligences and simplified them as follows:
    logical-mathematical
numbers
musical
sounds
spatial
sights
bodily-kinesthetic
actions
interpersonal
people
intrapersonal
feelings
naturalistic
nature
linguistic
words
    By the way, remember when I said that you all have the full cake, however you do have slices of varying sizes. I can only think of one living person who has all eight of these intelligences in a major way. In other words, a man with a very big cake. This is a man who, starting at the bottom of the list above, has written nine books and a number of linguistically rich and tongue-twistingly challenging songs, whose animal TV programme lasted for 19 series and was voted ‘Most Popular Factual Entertainment Show’ at the
National TV Awards
not once but five times, who the Daily Mail review of his autobiography 1 described as ‘a man of enormous emotional warmth’, who has performed at Glastonbury in front of tens of thousands of adoring if rather stunned people on four separate occasions, who was a junior national backstroke champion, whose paintings sell for tens of thousands of pounds and whose portrait of the Queen was voted the third favourite by
Radio Times
readers, whose musical career has included backing Kate Bush, being backed by the Beatles and releasing many chart singles including the 1969 Christmas number one, who has an honorary doctorate from the University of East London and arrived in the UK in 1952 with a plan of what he wanted to achieve and £297 in savings. 2
    Can you tell who it is yet? 3
    Anyway, back at the bank, I then looked at the old, empty church and asked myself eight questions about it through the spectrum of each of the intelligences. For example:
    Numbers
Why did it close and when?
Sounds
What bells were there and what could they play?
Sights
What different geometric patterns are there in the structure of the tower?
Actions
Where are the bricks from and how was it made?
People
Who was the first vicar and who was the last?
Feelings
How does it feel to stand in such a place?
Nature
What wildlife lives in the old churchyard?
Words
What was its name and how did it get it?
    It didn’t matter that I didn’t know the answers to these questions. That wasn’t the point. The thinking usually stops when the answers start anyway. As an Australian rabbi once said, ‘I’m not looking for answers that make the questions go away.’ The