On boring lessons

A blue background with a cartoon person wearing a white shirt and black trousers. They are slumped over a laptop which is on the desk in front of them. There is a mug on the desk behind the laptop

One of the things we see a lot is this idea that lessons have to be "engaging", that students have to be excited and enthused and entertained and other words beginning with 'e'.

A quick search of Twitter for the words "engaging + behave" gives us lots of people talking about the supposed link between engaging lessons and good behaviour choices. Yes, as Tom Bennett puts it "a well-planned lesson will help behaviour, and a badly planned one will make poor behaviour more likely" [1][italics in the original, bold mine], but that's not really about engagement; that's more about planning. I'm not here to debate whether there is a link between engaging lessons and good behaviour or not, I don't really care. Why don't I care? Because my job is to teach, not to entertain. My job title is "Teacher of Chemistry" not "Circus Clown". This might be controversial, but children don't have a right to be constantly entertained and there should be an expectation that they engage with stuff that bores the socks off them. Because that's life. Part of our job is to set our students up for the rest of their life. A lot of that will come through exam results, but part of that is from the Other Stuff - facing consequences for their actions, being held to account, being trusted, being responsible, and yes, behaving appropriately when they are bored. 

Last week, I commented on some of my expectations in the classroom. I didn't think they were anything special, just that if student falls asleep in my lesson, I expect a good reason and an apology. Aside from the 20-odd people who failed to read the original tweet properly and jumped down my throat with various "what about [good reason]?!" (like, yes, that's a good reason to fall asleep in my lesson, not gonna be a knob about it) there were a fair few who made comments about my lessons being boring, as if that was a good reason to fall asleep - "What if it's a dull lesson?", "I'm sorry you were boring", "be more stimulating", "Ask yourself 'is my lesson worth staying awake for?'" [2-5]. Now, I did a chemistry degree and after three hours of ligand substitution, suffice to say you are bored stiff. But it would be wildly impolite of me to fall asleep, and if I zoned out, I wouldn't have learned anything. If we allow our students to zone out, to switch off, to have a kip when they are bored in lessons, how does that prepare them for their future? A future where they will have to pay attention to stuff they find dull? A future where if they did that in a meeting they would be at very least reprimanded, and at worst, fired? We have to teach behaviour - children are not born knowing how to behave appropriately. It is important that students experience things like boredom otherwise they will never learn how to behave in those situations. 

Children have a right to be bored [I'm 90% sure this isn't an original quote, but I have no idea where I got it from]. To constantly entertain them is to do them a disservice. Like I said before, they will encounter situations where they will be bored and they will have to just suck it up. To deprive them of the opportunity to be bored as children is to leave them unequipped to deal with boredom as adults when things have much more extreme consequences. Daniel T. Willingham addresses this idea of not allowing students to be bored in his 2017 book, "The Reading Mind". In recent years we've seen a massive uptick in the amount of entertainment available to us. Because of this vast wealth of entertainment we are developing a "very low threshold for boredom"[6]. If you don't like something, if it's not instantly engaging, fine, scroll past, click the next video, find something else to entertain you [I know I can waste a whole day on Twitter alone, and that's without getting into TikTok and YouTube and the like]. We, adults and children, are becoming "impatien[t] with boredom". This is a bad thing, in case you were wondering. 'Children these days' probably don't have increasingly short attention spans - look how long they can sit and play Fortnite - they just can't deal with being bored. Avoiding this boredom is the reason teachers feel they need to be all-singing, all-dancing. It's the reason teachers are spending their weekends planning ridiculous lessons, coming in early to rearrange the seats in the classroom so they look like an aeroplane, and spending their own money on nonsense like sand and foam bricks.

We are teachers, not circus clowns. We are there to teach, not to entertain. It's, of course, great if we can do both, but our main goal is teaching. Teachers up and down the country are mucking about with "engaging" lessons that don't actually teach the children anything. Or at least don't teach the children as much as they could. I reckon you could ask almost any science teacher in England whether they had done some sort of crime scene scenario when teaching chromatography for the first time and they would say yes. But the kids don't learn the detail of chromatography from this. [I've done it with Skittles and whether or not the food dye was halal. Kids remembered nothing about chromatography, they remembered a whole lot about halal food colouring though!] They remember the scenario, they remember the fun. Now, it doesn't sound too bad "remembering the fun", but unfortunately the "fun" won't get them very far in life. They won't be asked questions about the fun on their exams. When they leave school with mediocre grades, they won't look at their limited life choices and think "well, the important thing is I had fun".

I want to make something clear - I am not saying lessons should be boring. I'm saying that it's okay if they aren't thrilling. When we put all our energy into making our lessons exciting, we lose sight of the purpose. Our purpose is to teach, to educate. How much of the time and energy spent thinking up novel ways to engage students could be better spent thinking up better, clearer ways to explain stuff? We need to be finding ways to make sure our students are engaged with the learning itself, that they're interested in the content, not the bumpf. As Mary Myatt put it, albeit referring to curriculum, "it's about taking the subject matter as being intrinsically interesting" [7], or if you prefer Tom Bennett "our aim is to help them find satisfaction in learning, which doesn't always mean joy, or pleasure" [8] [italics in the original]. Adding bells and whistles to our lessons masks the content, and it implies that the subject isn't interesting in its own right. Learning is awesome. Knowing stuff about stuff is great. We shouldn't need glitter and playdough and games to get that across. 


TL;DR:

  • being bored and behaving appropriately when you are is a valuable learning experience that we should allow our children to experience.
  • adding flashy nonsense to lessons detracts from the subject matter and makes it seem like it isn't interesting in of itself.

[1] Bennett, T., 2021. The running the room companion. 1st ed. John Catt, p.62.

[2] https://twitter.com/pepper735/status/1421392519833739265?s=20

[3] https://twitter.com/EdRoundtables/status/1421400739700744192?s=20

[4] https://twitter.com/ChrissieFadipe/status/1421402924396302340?s=20

[5] https://twitter.com/bjaerosmith/status/1421174443234238470?s=20

[6] Willingham, D., 2017. The reading mind: a cognitive approach to understanding how the mind reads. 1st ed. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, p.173.

[7] Myatt, M., 2020. The Curriculum: Gallimaufry to Coherence. 1st ed. John Catt, p.81.

[8] Bennett, T., 2021. The running the room companion. 1st ed. John Catt, p.91.