This is something that non-teachers ask all the time, though it is eight years now since I had to do that.

As a teacher if it is something you can do you never even think about it. Yet if you cannot do it as a teacher you are lost.

This was a question aI asked myself in 2000 when I had a bit of time on my hands. I analysed why some people could control a class nad others could not. It all came down to dominating a classroom using assertive body language.

I analysed the body language necessary and put it into a book for new teachers that I sold to schools for £70 each with photocopy rights.I sold over one hundred of these books, so I think I did a good job of passing on my accumulated experience to a large number of young teachers.

New teachers come to the job full of all the bright ideas and classroom management philosophies they have learned but they have not been taught the assertion techniques necessary to impose their will on a group of thirty five 6 foot tall unwilling 16 year old adolescent males.

These are the techniques that all politicians are taught at politician training school, but teachers’ training omits this essential skill. Given that teachers start the job at age twenty one, only a few years older than their students, they need more help than politicians, not less.

No classroom management technique will work unless the teacher is in charge of the class. Teacher educators are mostly failed teachers who have long forgotten the realities of life in the classroom.

Most practising teachers could not put their finger on how they control a class. Yet teacher dominance in the classroom is not politically correct, somehow. Without teacher dominance you will have anarchy and a Lord of the Flies situation, where the weakest fall.