Education--Boring Us To Death

A substitute teacher gets lots of opportunity to observe high school students in their natural habitat. I sit at the desk and let my eyes rove over the classroom until I am reasonably certain the assigned work is liable to receive at least promissory glance from a majority of the students.
As I look at the twenty to thirty faces in front of me, the dominant expression and emotion is one of sheer boredom. Whatever grade, whatever school, whatever subject—we are boring our kids to distraction—and spending billions to do it.
One serious reason we aren’t producing more and better scientist (or graduates that can identify George Washington or read and write) is that at some point the teacher’s droning monotone got so soporific, at least mentally, that we put whole classrooms to sleep. God help us, some stay that way for the rest of their lives.
(I remember being furious at the time of my high school graduation. I looked back over thirteen years and realized they could have taught me everything they had in not much more than six years. The school system had WASTED nearly six years of my life.
(That’s a loss even at eighteen! They wasted my life! There is no possible way I can calculate the number of lectures [and sermons] I have slept through. In my case, teachers and professors were largely content to let sleeping dogs lie. I didn’t put my head down—I propped it up and made a pretense of holding my pencil over my work. Today’s kids just nod right out.
(In college, I routinely skipped dull classes. Once an irate professor accosted me, berating me because he hadn’t seen me in a month. Sensing I might be in trouble, I asked, “Would you really rather I were there?” He shook his head and walked away mumbling.
(Had I not slept or skipped, I would have gone mad with boredom. To avoid that fate, I would sidetrack the instructor, raise an unanswerable question, and generally find ways to entertain myself. That’s not really the best way to get the most out of your tuition dollar.)
Kids today aren’t that different that I was. Possibly I was bolder in expressing my boredom. (I also had the advantage of knowing enough that it was relatively easy to manipulate many of my teachers.) But for those poor kids who cannot or are no longer interested enough to make a classroom interesting for themselves, I feel their boredom.
We bore smart kids, we bore dumb kids, we bore everyone in-between. We spend a vast fortune doing so—and we make prospective teachers spend five years in college before being hired and then we demand they go for a masters while teaching. They are spending all of that time and all of that tuition just so we can teach them to be appropriately (professionally) boring.
Many of them actually aren’t when you catch them outside of class and just chat with them. Many are downright intelligent and know a lot of interesting things. It’s a pity that we force them to spend so much time becoming boring—all in the name of being “professional”.
One cannot catch the imagination of every child. But it struck me the other day that there is something we could do to make our classrooms more interesting. Throw out some of the theory. No theory of teaching math or English ever caught the interest of any child, dull or bright.
Make them act. Train them in speech. Don’t allow anyone to become a teacher (of whatever subject or grade) who cannot project well enough to earn a place in a local civic theatre cast. “Trippingly on the tongue,” Hamlet said. Make it dramatic, bring it alive.
I’ve taken history at all levels of education. One of the teachers I remember best was my eleventh grade European history teacher. To this day, when I think of Italian or German unification in the 19th Century, I can hear Jack Boelem’s voice, see his face. His illustrations were to the point and interesting. His delivery could stand up to Ronald Reagan’s.
Tell stories. Go for the occasional shock value. Talk about the unusual or even the bizarre. Eventually some students will begin to believe—and even wake up. I never slept through Boelema’s class. I was never bored.