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

an experiment and, as any good scientist knows, experiments can’t go wrong. You may not get the result you were expecting, or even wanted, but youstill come out with a result, some form of feedback that you can use to tweak things further in the next lesson.
    Gandhi entitled his autobiography,
The Story of My Experiments with Truth
, so you could maybe take that as an inspiration for such a way of working.
    When I was a real teacher I used to plan lessons in great detail as per my training and then, in the classroom, explain in precise detail what I expected the students to do. There would always be one student, though, who listened diligently and attentively and then totally misread the instructions and went off and did something completely different. The interesting thing was that often what they stumbled across was better than what I had planned anyway. I learned quite quickly to set tasks that were both vague and focused at the same time. A clarity of outcome – what was to be learned – but a haziness in the process – exactly how they did it was up to them – was a far more effective way of setting up an activity in the classroom. What’s more, working like this was much less stressful, as I didn’t spend the lesson trying to bend the class to my will, as it were; involved less work in the planning stages for me which has to be a good thing; and produced better results in the classroom anyway.
    If you approach a lesson, however, as ‘this must work well or else I will have failed’–and heaven knows there is enough pressure on you to think this way – then you are setting yourself up for a constant and all-consuming sense of failure. And that can’t be good for anyone.
    One teacher I worked with was determined to ‘get it right’ all the time. He believed that he could ‘get the job done’ by the end of every day and go home with a clear conscience. But it is not that sort of job. Despite always being the first one in each morning and the last one to leave, he was never able to ‘get the job done’ and he was becoming a nervous wreck. What I realized at that point was that all teachers need a ‘Fu*k it! switch’. This is the point at the end of the day where, for the sake of their family, their health and their overall general well being, they say, ‘Fu*k it!’, pack their bags, switch off the lights and go home. Tomorrow is always another day. One of the greatest acts of kindness I have witnessed by a member of a leadership team was when I saw him suddenly spring up from his chair, open a window and yell at someone in the car park at the end of the day to go home. I thought it must be a student hanging around the teachers’ cars but it turned out to be an NQT who had a young family and was suffering the effects of balancing a first year in teaching with demands from home.
    The job will always be bigger than you are. You will never keep on top of it and, like building a wall out of cats, just when you think you have it all sorted you will have to start again. It’s the same in your lessons themselves. No matter how well you plan, it will not always go well.
    I once heard comedian Phil Jupitus being interviewed about how he felt on those occasions when he simply bombed in front of an audience, unable to raise a laugh or the smallest titter. He simply replied that he found it fascinating, that he was able to stand back from himself on the stage and look at the situation and ask himself, ‘I wonder why they are not laughing?’ 2 This ability to distance yourself from what is going on – good or bad – and look at it with the objective curiosity of the scientist is a useful ability to have. Another comedian, Tony Hawks, was satisfying a bet by pulling a fridge around Ireland, something that you know, if you’ve ever tried it, does not always go to plan. However, he soon realized that rather than getting stressed about the setbacks, the very fact that he was writing a book about the whole experience meant the more there were, the better the book would be. After all, ‘Went to Currys, caught the bus, went round Ireland, had some Guinness, came home’ is not much of a book. As he says in
Round Ireland with a Fridge
, ‘When you’re writing a book, when things go wrong you just think – that’ll make a good chapter. The more things go wrong, the better the book’ (Hawks 1999). So – and in NLP circles this would be called ‘reframing’–on a bad day, pretend you have a book to