Why Do I Need a Teacher When I’ve Got Google Read Online Free PDF Page B

How many people leave your school at the age of 16, about to set off on life’s path, less than a quarter into their one chance on this planet, but already feel they are doomed to a life of failure, lack and subservience? How many people have you met who see themselves as thick or stupid or incapable of achieving anything of any worth because ‘I didn’t do very well at school’? What is your message to the young people, the ‘sweetcorn kids’, who have gone through the entire system and come out pretty much in the same state as when they went in? Serves you right? You should have listened? I can’t help you now! Or maybe you can tell them what Mr Dyson would tell them if he were there: ‘It doesn’t matter.’
    Now, again, before you throw out your dual cyclone, he’s not advocating widespread academic failure. The James Dyson Foundation website 2 encourages people to apply to them for jobs ‘if you are a graduate’. But he’s also a realist and a pragmatist who knows, from his own experience at school apart from anything else, that school is a narrow little academic tunnel and there is a far bigger picture out there once you get out of school if only you can hang onto your self-worth and your sense of ambition as you go through it.
    School, in other words, is just a phase you’re going through.
    Just before Christmas 2007, I was approached by the then exciting and vibrant QCA to explore the issue of ‘Commitment to Learning’, looking at motivation towards and perceptions of learning in key stage three children around the country. Through a wide range of media from online surveys to face-to-face
WIIFM?Cam
(What’s In It For Me?) interviews in a number of schools around the UK we identified three major factors that seemed to contribute to poor motivation, disengagement and disaffection in the year eight students, one of which related directly to this idea of ‘The Great Educational Lie’:
    Our research showed that students felt that education was important for their futures (nearly 70% according to the online questionnaire) but what this meant was that learning ‘stuff’ was important if you needed that same ‘stuff’ in whichever job you were going to do when you were older: ‘You need to do well in Food Tech if you’re going to be a chef’. (With the corollary ‘If I don’t want to be a chef I can just mess around in Food Tech’.)
    (Gilbert 2008)
    Another girl on one of our filmed interviews pointed out that she didn’t need geography because ‘I’m not going to be a, er, geography person’. 3
    In other words, by propagating ‘The Great Educational Lie’ and by doing so in an environment, such as school, where knowledge is demarked by department area boundaries, we have made a rod for own backs when it comes to trying to motivate children to learn a subject for which they can’t see the point. (And I was a French teacher in Northampton so I know about these things. ‘Why do we have to learn French, Mr Gilbert?’ to which you give the set reply, ‘Because you live in Northampton. And you never know … !’)
    What’s more, research on students with low self-esteem shows that they suffer most when they perceive there to be a big gap between how important they know schoolwork to be and how bad at it they feel they are. In the book
Social Motivation: Understanding Children’s School Adjustment,
the authors point out that:
    One can reduce such a discrepancy by either increasing one’s competence or by discounting the importance of the domain.
    (Juvonen and Wentze 1996)
    In other words, students will simply claim that a particular subject is unimportant if they are under the impression, misguided or otherwise, that its mastery is beyond them.
    What did we recommend to QCA as a result of our findings in the classroom?
    Grasping the opportunity to move away from the hegemony of content to a focus on skills and competences will contribute to increased commitment to learning if done well.