This is an exhortation, a plea, a pat on the back and a push
up the hill. It is meant to inspire and unsettle, and to help you find your
passion and determination. It comes as a request and a challenge: Don’t plan to
go into class and tell your students, “This is the boring part.”
Haven’t you and the kids been bored enough already!? When we
were students in school, when our minds were striving to explore and
understand, how often we ourselves were bored, and our teachers looked and
sounded so bored themselves. I thought they should say to us, “Learning to be
bored in school is preparing you to be bored as an adult. Get used to it. This day
will be another exercise in learning to be bored.”
It is not a version of grit to passively accept boredom. It
is not a version of grit to be passive. For teachers or for students. It’s a
version of submission.
It is good to know how to manage one’s boredom in life
without losing one’s mind. It is good to learn to cope with disappointment and
failure, and to find inner resolve. And there’s enough boredom and
disappointment and failure in the commerce of life to learn those lessons
without my actually building it into a task that my students have no choice
about and saying, “Here’s something else you’ll find boring.”
We and our students never get back the minutes that
accumulate into hours of boredom in a school year. You read the directions to standardized tests
and the students spend that much time listening to you. On the first day of
staff orientation in the fall, the superintendent, with all good intentions,
reads through the myriad new regulations, and you can’t wait for it to be over
so you can get to your class room. It’s in school and out of school: waiting
for the bus to arrive because the funding for adequate public transportation
was cut; being on hold to a call center half-way around the world where labor
was cheaper. There’s a lot of boredom for citizens that is the result of intentional
planning. All of that is not inevitable boredom, and it wears us down.
It’s time to rebel against the forces that conspire to make
us passive. We are teachers! When we stand in the class, we are the most
influential force in the lives of our students. In that time and place we are
potentially their hero, their role model, their hope. And because we are
teachers, we know something very important, almost mysterious in its power: all
information is potentially interesting, every skill acquired broadens our
potentials, and all impassioned activity leads to learning. Our best teachers
showed us over and over that life is not a struggle against boredom—it is a
wonder to be apprehended.
I don’t have control over many boring and draining things in
school I wish I had control over: I have to proctor standardized tests; I have
to cajole and demand that students wait quietly when it is so hard for them to
do that at their age; I have to stop mid-sentence for announcements and bells.
But I don’t have to walk into class and tell them that “This
is the boring part.” That’s in my control.
In my work with teachers for over 35 years, I have heard almost all of
them share promises they made to themselves: I will never hit a kid; I will never
ask a student to sit in the corner as punishment; I will never tell a student
that she is bad. Yes, yes, yes. That’s how it should be. And I ask and
challenge you to consider, “I will not bore myself today because I will not
plan to bore the kids.” Let’s not watch more of the sands of our own professional
lives slip away in boredom that we can avoid.
As much as I have had that as my intention (and not only in
the classroom, but in faculty meetings as well, and wouldn’t you like your
principal to have the intention not to bore you at meetings?), I know I have
sometimes bored students. It wasn’t in my plans, but a class would end and I
knew Edgar over there was missing in action. But I didn’t plan it. I’d have to
check in with Edgar and find out what didn’t work for him, because I didn’t see
a boring part in my lesson plan. Edgar might have something to teach me about
my planning. And because so much of my career has been spent with challenging
students, who are often barely holding on to their motivation, if I didn’t
communicate the worth of the lesson, they were unlikely to find whatever little
motivation was left in their tank.
Perhaps we could translate our phrase, “This is the boring
part,” into “I have no idea how to make this interesting,” or “I can’t figure
out why this is in the curriculum guide,” or “I know this is truly worthless to
you,” or “I too am but a fallible person trapped in a system that is slowly
killing my passion and I am so sorry that you have to bear any of the burden of
that.” Since we won’t be declaring those things, here are some preventative
steps to take when you look at your lesson plan and say, “This is the boring
part”:
1)
Seek the
links—When the information in the required curriculum seems so far from
their lives that you assume it will be boring (why else would information be
boring?), offer them the challenge to make the connections. Don’t do the
hypothetical, “You never know when you will be building a shed and need to use
the Pythagorean Theorem” if you yourself have never used the Pythagorean
Theorem. Tell them how the information truly impacts you as an adult. Consider how the information may impact the
lives of their families, or their community. Have them survey members of their
community: “Tell me why you think I should learn about the three branches of
government?” The class can send emails to professional organizations that are
impacted by that information. Invite in a local professional.
2)
Develop
cognitive challenges using Blooms Taxonomy—Thinking is inherently
interesting, even if the facts may seem irrelevant. Throughout the year
underscore the types of thinking you are asking of students: “You have to do
some powerful analyzing today to see what are the most important pieces to this
information;” “As we do this, let’s evaluate whether we should add this to the
list of essential information;” “The challenge today is to find a way to
translate this information so that your younger brother or sister would
understand it.” One of the benefits of applying higher-order thinking to
information is that it is far better remembered.
3) Time it—“Class, I am not sure if any of
you will find this interesting, so let’s set the timer for five minutes, and
then stop and talk about what you think of this.”
4)
Look at
the task through multiple intelligences—Graphs and pictograms offer various
perspectives on what may at first seem dry data. Giving a dramatic reading to a
list of historical names and dates is not boring to either try or to watch.
Asking students to verbally free associate with rules of grammar is hilarious.
Chanting as a class the chemical symbols on the Periodic Table of the Elements
is sublime.
5) Encourage and allow for creative
note-taking. –Teachers often identify note-taking as a boring part of the
class. Of course it is, if the students have little inherent interest in the
material and note-taking is condemned to be only for the test coming up. Start
making note taking interesting with two column notes, which offer students a
space to make their own connections and rhymes, drawings and stick figures.
Have students share with the class their most interesting note-taking
creations. Try it yourself, watching or listening to the news at home one
evening, and see how idiosyncratic and engaged you can make note-taking. Celebrating how students employ arrows and
underlines and boxes and shadowing and parenthetical commentary can make
note-taking a collectively enriching opportunity, dare I say one of the best times you’ll offer students in
class.
6)
Offer to
summarize essential ideas—If the next two pages of the textbook are deadly
and likely to destroy momentum, tell the students your summary, ask them to
summarize what you said in their own words, and move on. You can do the same
for sections of movies. Let’s not confuse what takes effort with what is worth
the effort; e.g. digging a deep hole in the ground and immediately filling it
up again takes effort, but it’s not worthwhile. Laboriously reading boring
textbooks should be kept to a minimum, and identified for what it is— a
challenge, if you have no alternative (you probably do). Don’t undermine your
relationship with your students by using your teacher power to coerce them to do
really boring tasks because it will be “good for them.” It’s not good for any
of you.
7)
Don’t
teach it—Integrate a few of the main ideas into another lesson.
The last item above might put many of our colleagues into
risk with their school administration. We are in an era of imposed curriculum,
in which our wisdom as teachers to make decisions about how to bring our very
real students to mastery is not being honored and trusted. Too many of our
colleagues are trapped in systems in which they must rigidly check off that
they have “covered” items on a predetermined (and not critically assessed)
pacing guide. The standardized test demands that students be exposed to
information at such a rate that meaning and depth are often false advertising.
So do what you can. One of the seven items above can usually
help you avoid, “This is the boring part.” And then consider digging into your
own professional soul for some grit to join committees, professional
associations, political campaigns, contract negotiating teams, letter writing
efforts, and public hearings, adding your voice to the others who are exhorting
us, on behalf of our students and ourselves, not to passively allow the work of
schools to be boring. Your students will love you for it.
PS--if you have a lesson that you can''t get around being boring, write about it in the comment section and I'll brainstorm with you ideas.
