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

association. In other words, someone’s memories for a particular event are linked to the environment in which the event took place. It’s what you experience when you revisit somewhere you haven’t been to for many years and your long-buried memories come flooding back to you. Or when parents come back into a school for a parents evening and you can see the colour drain from their faces. If you want your children to come into your classroom feeling positive then it is important that you send them out feeling positive. Just by coming into your classroom – or even seeing your face – the memories of the previous experiences with you come back to them and you have the power to determine what those memories are. What’s more, research on people having colonoscopies showed that if the last few minutes of the procedure were bearable, they had a better overall recollection of the entire event, and were more able to forget or overlook how awful the experience was. However, if the last few minutes were bad, their memory of the entire procedure was a negative one. 7
    The beginning of a lesson is of vital importance too, not just because recall levels are highest for the early part of a period of learning, but also because, like the opening sequence of a Bond film, it sets the tone for what is to come. I have seen so many lessons get off to a dire start because the teacher used that time to do battle with the class over hats, earphones, their behaviour as they entered and ‘Will you be quiet while I do the register – it should only be my voice I can hear, 10G!’. There are many ways of taking a register that don’t involve taking a register. Getting the children to ‘sign in’ when they arrive, asking one of the children to register their peers when they arrive, taking it quietly a few minutes into the lesson, incorporating the taking of the register into a warm-up activity where the child has to give an answer when their name is called. This is especially effective when the activity is of a more general creative thinking-type one rather than a knowledge or memory exercise. One teacher I observed used to set tasks like, ‘If you were a home appliance which one would you be and why?’ and have the children sharing their response with the class as their name was called out. Another one was, ‘Why is a history lesson like a … (insert name of animal here)?’ In such a way she had the class’s attention, the register was completed, she had them in the right state for learning and had their brains ‘warmed up’ to ensure they worked well and knew why history was like a camel, all in the first few minutes of a lesson. What she never did, like her colleague was threatening to do, was start the lesson with a verbal roasting. Apparently, there are great similarities between the symptoms of ADHD, bipolar disorder and fear according to Dorothy Rowe, author of
Beyond Fear, Not Mad or Bad, Just Scared
. Speaking in
New Scientist
she said:
    Like adults, children fear many things, but one thing all children fear is adults … If a child continues being afraid, she or he won’t function normally, learn or be happy. The people responsible for that child’s welfare won’t be doing their job properly if they don’t reassure them.
    (
New Scientist
, 16/06/07)
    What are you doing, then, to consciously and deliberately reassure children that ‘it’sOK’?
    What we planned instead for the Friday afternoon art lesson was a starter that involved music from the Schwarzenegger film
Conan the Barbarian
accompanied by the teacher dropping the occasional plastic drawer on the floor whilst the class drew whatever these sounds inspired in them under the heading ‘War’. After three minutes of this, the teacher pulled the class together and explained the objectives for the lesson in a quiet but excited tone (as if the objectives did actually matter) before telling them in a very matter-of-fact way that he would have to speak to them about their homework in 20 minutes and could one of the students keep an eye on his watch to remind him when that time came. Once the students were engaged in the main part of the lesson, the art teacher drew in poster paint squeezed from a bottle, a ‘target’ symbol of concentric rings on the floor in one part of his classroom. After 20 minutes he attracted the attention of what had become a comparatively diligent class and, from the centre of his target, in a serious but again very matter-of-fact