Teacher's block

Growing up my one of my favourite novels was Michael Morpurgo's The Butterfly Lion, a beautiful story of a human-animal friendship that every child craves. One of Morpurgo's beliefs is that in order for the reader to turn the page they must believe in what they are reading, suspend their disbelief and lose themselves in a fictional world. For this to happen he too must believe in his own story.

In Morpurgo's latest article for the Guardian he exposed himself as a failed academic, gaining a string of bad grades including a third class degree but asserted the belief that he was a great teacher.
I cannot help but agree with Morpurgo that it is not the exam results we churn out year after year that denote our true intelligence, but 'it is aptitude, the ability to enthuse, to communicate, to motivate, that is far more important'.

If one is talented enough to communicate well, be it to children or adults, they have an invaluable gift. In a world of technology we have lost the ability to communicate. We have conversations without speaking, the internet has invalidated the need for discussion, society is dominated by wi-fi and its followers. Teachers can no longer communicate with their students in a way that truely inspires because they, unlike Morpurgo, have no reason to believe in what they say.

In an age when exam results are of utmost importance the emphasis is no longer on the gaining of knowledge but the short-term-high-success-rate memorising of information. How can teachers be truely inspired when they are aware of the fact that they can easily be replaced by the textbook/wikipedia combination.

I am not saying that this is true of all teachers, every now and then there is someone who can truely captivate and animate a class. In my experience however, these are the people who are not afraid to stray from the set expectations, and they usually have their own criticisms of the system they are a part of.