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

acting in the best interests of the children?
Am I being professional?
Am I doing my best?
    If he could answer yes to all three, he could go home with a clear conscience. In a report in
The Times
in 2008 entitled ‘School Systems Let Down Our Children’ the newspaper pointed out that:
    Schools seeing most improvement seem to be those with determined headteachers not afraid to innovate.
    (
The Times
, 29/09/08)
    (Not forgetting the brave deputies there are out there too. After all, I have noticed that heads make things happen, but deputies make
sure
things happen.)
    In
The Telegraph
in 2005 under the banner headline, ‘The secret of our success? Ignore Government advice – The primary school that tops today’s league tables says it did so by ignoring much of what the Government told it to do’, it describes how headteacher Barbara Jones of Combe Church of England School in Oxfordshire:
    did not implement the national literacy and numeracy strategies imposed in 1998. After scanning them for useful advice and tips, she consigned them to a top shelf and continued with the tried and tested methods that have made the school the most successful in England.
    ( www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1504532/The-secret-of-our-success-Ignore-Government-advice.html )
    In my experience, the heads who care most are the ones who just don’t give a damn.
    Compare that with the headteacher I met in Essex who ruminated over lunch with me during a training day, ‘I’ve changed nothing in 14 years.’
    Does the phrase, ‘Quit while you’re a head’ mean nothing … ?
    So much for the heads, what then about the ‘lazy teachers’? This is my way of suggesting that we need teachers who are prepared to step back just a little bit more from the teaching and help the children get on a whole lot more with the learning.
    In many ways, this chapter is the corollary to the previous one. I am suggesting that as teachers we can step out of the limelight a little more to allow the learners to step into it and take their place as confident independent learners, empowered by a teacher to experiment and innovate in the way the teacher has been empowered to do by their leader.
    Why are you planning the lesson when they could? Why are you leading the warm-up activity when they could? Why are you setting out the learning objectives when they could? Or maybe you could involve your Teaching Assistant in the process? Why are you dividing the class into groups, organizing the furniture, watching the clock and handing out the resources when they could? They probably did it for themselves at primary school anyway. Why are you setting and then marking the test when they could as part of the
Assessment for Learning
process? And why, oh why, areyou still setting the sort of homework 1 that involves taking in 30 books to mark and thus robbing you of a Sunday afternoon spent with your family (unless, of course, your motivation is to avoid a Sunday afternoon spent with your family)?
    LaoTsu in the
Tao Te Ching
, the ancient Chinese text that is central to the Taoism that we met in the previous chapter, said:
    A leader is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves.
    I like that in a classroom. It’s good for them, not to mention the benefits it brings to you. Not only will you get your Sundays back (and for more on the subject have a look at Jim Smith’s
The Lazy Teacher’s Handbook
) but it might be better for your health too. According to the Government’s School Workforce statistics, three million working days were lost to stress in 2007, an increase on the previous year and something the
Daily Mail
reported as ‘15,000 Teachers Go Sick EVERY day (and it’s Blamed on Stress and Ministerial Meddling)’. 2 With remarkable predictability this story was commented on online by a ‘Foster, Leeds’ with the remarks:
    Lets [sic] face it, a great proportion of teachers are whinging, moaning leftwing layabouts. They could’nt [sic] survive in the real world where your last week’s figures or results depend on you keeping your job. If you don’t like the heat get out of the kitchen! And [sic] try working for a living.
    It’s enough to make you. [sic]
    Back in the real world, the benefits of teaching less can even go as far as your voice. Research from the National Center for Voice and Speech 3 in the US ‘tracked’ the voices of 57 male and female teachers, not only in their