Misbehaving teens suffer from boredom
Kids are just so bored.
I’m being a teaching assistant in one of London’s secondary schools and it is just something, to be honest, dead boring, sitting there and listening to what the teacher says. If I was to sit still and only listen, I’d simply die. Thank god I need to take care of teen’s misbehavior, handling their hilarious jokes…
When they misbehave, it’s out of boredom. You know this cheeky smile when they explain what went wrong, what evil spirit made them do the deed? It tells you all you ought to know about the source of it. It wasn’t that X provoked me by calling me names. I just wanted something to happen, couldn’t stand the constant of the information flow that doesn’t move me a bit. I genuinely do not care about cell’s organelles or igneous rocks. Something either happen, or I’ll go nuts. Okay then, I go nuts. Here we go.
And they go nuts. And they misbehave. They search and find — the infinite ways to annoy the teacher, just to glimpse a pinch of action. Something they could hold on to, even if only for a brief instant. “Miss, can I go to the medical”, “Miss, send me to the learning center”, “Miss, he took my pen”, “Miss, she called me gay”. Because they have no way to holding on the steady tone of teacher’s lecture. No access to chronology, that loses its clarity after half a sentence with more than two characters.
A year ago, I’d be a person preaching of how teachers should engage, how they should be energetic and dynamic, enthusiastic about their topics, how they should have knowledge of learning processes and differentiation techniques, or at least how they should simply know their stuff. But I see it a bit different now. Kids cannot be engaged when put in settings not allowing them to be. Settings of their attractive peers, easy accessed leisure, culture of becoming cool with no effort. What can compete with that? Organelles?
No mater how creatively the material’s presented, some kids will never be drawn to it. I have a student who is very pretty and she dyes her straight, long hair blond. She’s all filigree except the eyes; and has a cute beauty mark on her right cheek. She is considered a misbehaving student by the teachers, and a popular by other kids.
Wherever I’m on the lesson with her, whatever Science, English or else, she never listens to the teacher. In fact, she listens carefully to all the people around but the teacher. She’d respond to a kid’s comment from the farthest end of the classroom, but never teacher’s straight forward question. And as a result, when her classmates happen to misbehave, she does too. Being an odd one out would be a reason to despair.
But then, put her in the class of three kids whose opinion she doesn’t care much about, you find her finishing an essay with her eyes sparkling and cheeks flushing. You find her asking questions. You find her respectful and smiley. Honest and acute. With some god damn sadness behind her big brown eyes.
Could we do anything about her boredom? Making science more attractive, meaning: possible to relate. Not all is adjustable, but those bits that are, may later have an impact and lessen reluctance to more theoretical ones.
What can inspirational quotes teach us today:
It’s better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring. Marilyn Monroe
Essentially kids consider school boring. Being a nerd who disagree, automatically makes you a loser. Kids love class clowns, who are usually students that must be clowns to cover their inability to access knowledge. They’d be considered boring if they start working tediously on boring school stuff. They’d be socially dead.
I would rather die of passion than of boredom. Vincent van Gogh
Most of the teens aged 12, 13, 14 have not yet acquired the knowledge necessary to call it passion. You must know at least something about a specific subject and then have a will to follow it up, to develop your passion for it. What they know, however, how to do without failing, is to lead adults to the edge of their sanity. That’s the passion for them, because not only are they experts in it, do they also gain a status among their peers. They have a real passion for misbehaving and fitting in, and they’d rather suffer any consequences, than to be sentenced to classroom boredom.
Boredom after all, is a form of criticism. Wendell Phillips
Could that be that the kids are communicating something important with their behavior? Maybe we’re so fed up with their silliness, because it somehow hits us on a personal level? Maybe with their jokes and jostlings they’re criticizing teachers’ poor performance? Mad and helpless, accusing us of being dull and spineless. I’m not saying we must be like them to teach them effectively, our generation is able to teach younger, different generation, successfully. But we must learn to listen. Listen to them and understand what they communicate. Because less experienced, they have not enough vocabulary. It alone’s enough to make us feel superior and arrogant. But then we miss a great chance to learn. Is learning from teens scary for you?…
The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity. Dorothy Parker
I wish it was the case in every school.
