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

by the teacher is significantly related to subsequent delinquent behavior and academic difficulties in early adolescence’. Troublesome children, especially boys, as you may perhaps expect, were most likely to be shouted at, with ‘children who are relatively well adjusted’ at the lowest risk of being verbally abused, however, as the research tellingly points out:
    These children are the most vulnerable to subsequent developmental difficulties.
    (Brendgen
et al
. 2006) 6
    Shouting at children, unless either they or something near them is on fire, is demeaning to them and to the nature of a postgraduate profession, causes too much ‘collateral damage’ as the whole class starts to feel bad and what you want to achieve you can achieve in other ways anyway. Just find the teachers in your school who never shout and ‘model’ what they do. Strategies I use include starting an interesting sentence loudly –‘The thing that is fascinating is …’–and then stopping expectantly, or starting loudly but then quickly bringing my voice down (leading to the classic line, ‘Don’t make me have to whisper!’). In my first few days as a ‘proper’ teacher after that particular sobering experience as a student teacher, I vowed never to shout at children. They had given me a bottom set group, the sort with several notches in their rulers signifying the teachers they had‘disposed of’ over the last year. The last one was a ‘nervous breakdown’ they told me proudly. However, the mental stress tables were turned when I refused to shout at them as they went through their repertoire. ‘Why don’t you shout at us?’, they asked me in all seriousness. ‘I don’t shout,’ was my straightforward reply and I stuck to my guns. (Not real guns, although that would be a way to avoid having to shout.) In fact the only time I can remember losing it with a child, one of my tutor group, where I stood him outside and then lambasted him in true teacher style, I then apologized to him at the end of the lesson whereupon he apologized to me for pushing me as far as he did and congratulated me on my ‘technique’.
    When it comes to attracting the attention of a noisy class, various effective strategies I have seen include the Brownie leader’s favourite of putting your finger on your lips and standing with an expectant air, starting a slow handclap that soon gets taken up by the entire class or, and this is one I’ve seen used to good effect in an arena full of about 3,000 noisy people, simply raising your hand and waiting. When I first tried this with a class when I was doing a spot of supply teaching, I suddenly ended up with a group of children all with their hands in the air looking at me expectantly. Unsure what to do next, I raised my other hand which they all did too. We then swayed once to the left, once to the right, clapped our hands three times and got on with the lesson.
    Another way of communicating with children in a non-verbal and definitely non-shouty way is the ‘Hot Spot’ idea. The Hot Spot is a part of your classroom you never normally go to and that you only go into in order to administer some sort of verbal discipline or to voice your displeasure at something the class has done. Never teach from there and never discipline the class from anywhere but there. It doesn’t take very long before the class realize that if you are standing at the front then all is well but if you are standing in the Hot Spot they had better watch out! Before long, all you need to do is to start walking over to the Hot Spot and this is picked up at a subconscious level by the class and the noise starts to go down without anyone really noticing why.
    I was once explaining this to an art teacher who had been having issues with a particular year ten group. We were planning a lesson that he was then going to deliver with me observing one Friday afternoon. I asked him what areas he was going to cover in the lesson and he mentioned the fact that he had to talk to them about the poor quality of their homework and that he was going to do this, as I have seen many teachers do, first thing. For me, the beginnings and ends of lessons are sacrosanct. Lessons are like sticks in this way, the bit in the middle is necessary but less important. Because we remember more from the ends than from the middle, it is important to make sure the children will remember positive experiences,not negative ones. What’s more, we memorize through