Beating Boredom: Two Tactics, Two Thoughts

Dear colleague,

Years ago, I travelled to Germany with a group of teachers to study the school system there, and one of my traveling companions was an economics teacher named Martha Sevetson Rush. Martha was one of those second-career teachers that exudes a passion for the work. After college, she had been a journalist, but once she started covering schools, her mind couldn’t stop spinning with the possibilities of the classroom. And so Martha put down the pen and picked up the chalk, to the benefit of countless students since.

But the pen kept calling. Several years ago, Martha and I reconnected in Minnesota. She shared with me then about a project she was working on: a book on student engagement, specifically aimed at combatting the degree to which millions of secondary students find school to be close to meaningless. Needless to say, it's a topic we are all concerned with.

That project became Martha's book, Beat Boredom: Engaging Tuned-Out Teenagers. I want to share two of the chapters I found helpful and two of the enduring thoughts the book has left me with.

Two Tactics

Tactic 1: Use storytelling to draw students in.

In the reading chapter of my book These 6 Things, I described the nine moves I use for teaching with a given text, and the first of those moves is to develop a simple, efficient hook prior to reading. Sometimes this can be the Take a Stand activity or a startling statistic related to the article you’re having students read. But other times, stories are just the right thing.

Martha provides helpful instruction on how to do this, and her chapter on storytelling reminded me of Dan Willingham’s storytelling chapter in Why Don’t Students Like School?

Tactic 2: End a lesson or a unit with discussion or debate.

Long-time readers of the blog will be familiar with the pop-up format I use for debates and discussions in my room, but for those who are new, see Chapter 4 of These 6 Things or this overview post. Whenever I say to my students, “At the end of our study here, we’re going to have a debate on X prompt,” their interest rises.

Martha’s chapter on debate is one I’ve bookmarked because of the additional strategies she brings to an important, timeless tool for improving student motivation and student growth.

Two Thoughts

I left Martha's book with two thoughts tumbling around.

Thought 1: Not all boredom is bad, but that doesn't mean we should make things more boring than they need to be.

James Clear writes about “falling in love with boredom” in his book Atomic Habits, arguing that if we’re to build better lives, we need to become more comfortable with boredom.

• Would you like to run a marathon? The first few runs will likely be more fun and engaging than the 25th one. But unless you persist, your training plateaus.
• Want to get stronger? It's fun getting beneath a bar at first. But eventually — say, on the 30th trip to the gym — the monotony sets in. But unless you persist, your strength won't grow.
• Want to get through that book stack? Then the next time you and your partner think about watching a movie, you ought to propose sitting next to one another and reading books instead. But I really want to see this movie!!! I know. The book is comparatively boring.

Relatedly, in Deep Work, Georgetown computer science professor Cal Newport writes that the superpower of our day is the ability to resist the sugar-high engagement of shallow work (e.g., email checking, social media engagement) and to immerse in the high-value but high-difficulty efforts of deep work.

Martha’s book isn’t opposed to these ideas. Rather, she’s taking issue with pointless and frustrating boredom, while Clear and Newport advocate for an embrace of purposeful, rewarding boredom. This distinction is critical. If our goal is for our students to grow in their mastery of the disciplines so this mastery might contribute to their long-term flourishing, then we want to rid school of as much unproductive boredom as possible. If you do read Martha's book, be careful not to take away a reading that suggests all boredom is bad, and be careful not to communicate this kind of sentiment to students.

Thought 2: Systemic boredom is a problem.

One thing I struggle with is that, though the demotivation our students experience is influenceable at the level of our classrooms, much of it is rooted in broken systems. Yes, your students’ engagement can be influenced (via the Five Key Beliefs) in the context of your classroom, but if your students have experienced an incoherent, nonsequential, knowledge-lite curricula during the five years preceding your classroom, then your students’ level of prior knowledge will affect their motivation. When I approach work in an area that I know much about, I’ll be more likely to think I can succeed at that work than I will in an area that I know little about — the link between prior knowledge and motivation is commonsensical when I put it that way but remarkably underappreciated in much of our professional discourse.

So what I’m saying is that teacher-writers like Martha and I are right to focus work on helping teachers like ourselves move the needle on student motivation in our current settings with our current kids. Martha’s book is aimed at this, just as Chapter 2 of These 6 Things is aimed at it, just as The Student Motivation Course is aimed at it, just as my most recent book and mini-courses are. But more and more, I’m bothered by the weaknesses of our systems and the critical flaws in our curricula.

In short, we’ve got to do what we can to, as Martha puts it, beat unproductive, frustrating boredom. But we’ve also got to start getting our best minds on the problem of shoddy, incoherent, siloed K-12 curricula.

Teaching right beside you,

DSJR