Are you bored yet?

Are you bored yet?

As a long-time teacher of high school history, and the father of five children (the oldest turned 37 last week!), I have probably heard the phrase “this is boring” more than anyone else on the planet. I have taken students across Checkpoint Charlie from West to East Berlin (“this is boring, it is taking so long just to go through this gate”); to the Tut exhibit (“can I skip the audio tour and go right to the snack bar?”); and to the steps of the Parthenon (“you mean we can’t even go inside? What was the point of climbing all the way up here?”) I have listened to my own children complain about boring car rides, airplane trips, visits to the Louvre, symphony concerts, and baseball games (okay, maybe that last example is legit!) and I have heard countless times how boring I am because I would rather watch the news than subject myself to back to back episodes of “SpongeBob Squarepants.”

For my students and even my own children “this is boring” has typically been their first salvo in any negotiation about taking on a task that is difficult, cumbersome, or requires them to apply themselves without any apparent hope of instant gratification. Oh, I am sure that there are children out there (I hear about them at cocktail parties) who relish a challenge, throw themselves into the dreariest tasks, and will one day be on the covers of magazines that my own kids will be borrowing money from me to buy. I just haven’t met too many of them.

Most adolescents, in particular, while wonderful people and delightful to chat and play with, take on a new persona when the prospect of grunt work is laid before them. Even those of us adults who love our jobs, and parenting, and our chosen leisure activities have come to understand that hard and sometimes tedious work is often a necessary means to an end. Young people, on the other hand, still live in that lovely world of believing that they only have to do those things which they find inherently interesting and enjoyable. And then there is school...

As we enter the second decade of the 21st century, teaching has never been so challenging. How do you engage students who are used to being entertained rather than enlightened? How do you challenge children to stretch themselves beyond their perceived limits when the process might involve some tough sledding before the “fun” stuff begins?

One activity that I have used with students and adults is the replication of a supplied figure (Lego Man – actually a non-gender specific model!) as a member of a team. There are a host of ground rules – as with all such exercises – but the one basic tenet is that you may not begin to assemble your model until you have completed your planning. In fact, the competitive aspect of the task is based upon the speed of actual assembly. In other words, a team that takes 10 minutes to plan and 5 to assemble will lose out to a team that spends an hour on the drawing board put puts their model together in 45 seconds. The “lesson” of the exercise centres around the cost and time efficiencies of effective pre-planning rather than engaging in a number of false starts and backtracking. The real challenge is that, for most people (adults and students) the planning part is “boring”. In fact, as a facilitator, I count on some “type A” groups plunging into the task and getting so mired in it that they never finish. As frustration sets in, and group members see that no progress is being made, the task once again becomes “boring” and one by one they disengage from the team.
Not surprisingly, students in Grades 4 and 5 are the most effective at completing this task. Not only are they familiar with the medium (lego) but they still have the patience to wait until they are absolutely certain of success before getting their hands dirty. Most adults and most teenagers are not quite so patient. The best that they can usually hope for is some sort of balance between their planning and doing.

So what implication does this have for the classroom? We all know that teaching has changed. From the teacher centred classrooms of the fifties and sixties, through the laissez-faire approach of the seventies and eighties, and following the data-driven decade at the end of the last century, the fourth era in modern pedagogy has emerged. The last ten years have seen the growth of outcomes-based, collaborative strategies that require hard work and commitment from both teacher and student. At Somersfield, where I am, Montessori programmes have always reflected this approach and, when you take the time to look past courses of study and to drill down to the unit planners of the MYP you will see that our middle school faculty embrace that philosophy as well.

The only barrier to learning then is the level of engagement of students and teachers in the process. You see, to work effectively, this approach requires a lot of “boring” work! Time consuming planning and preparation by the teacher; commitment and serious application by the student. Not every minute is going to be taken up by cool exercises with the Smart Board, surfing the web on a laptop, or watching an engaging video on YouTube. There are actually going to be some minutes, hours, and days that are devoted to plain old, boring work! Reading, researching, working through math problems, writing up experiments, practicing the clarinet – you name it, it all takes time.

The last time that I wrote in this blog, I talked a bit about homework and about the school/home partnership that is essential for student success. So the next time your child comes home complaining about being bored at school, you can take one of two tacks...you can ask them if they have completed all their assigned work; if the work is too easy; if they are getting the near perfect scores that would indicate that they have mastered this skill level and are ready to move on; and, if the answers are all yes – then it is up to us to take them to the next level in their learning. If there are some “no’s” then they still have some work to do as well.

As a parent said to me on the street yesterday – “Kids think that math is boring? This is supposed to be news? When was it ever interesting?” Or as I often had parents say to me at interview time, “I’m not surprised that my daughter/son finds History boring. I always did too.”

I guess that that’s why I’ll never be the one on the cover of that magazine!