Next year I think I’m going to make my classroom a little more boring.  Boring, to be bored, these are words that infer a negative image, sitting around with nothing to do.  We use phrases like, “I’m bored stiff,” or even worse “I’m bored to death,” to describe this feeling.  Dictionary.cambridge.org defines it as “ feeling tired and unhappy because something is not interesting or because you have nothing to do”. Synonyms are listed as fatigued, tired and antonyms  as thrilled and amused.  Being bored happens because sometimes we are not interested in the jobs needed to be done, they do not “thrill” or “amuse” us and very rarely do we have nothing to do, we just don’t want to do that which needs being done.

When I was a kid being bored happened,  but the trick was you kept it to yourself.  You would never announce to a parent, “I’m bored,” because it was usually followed up with, “Well, find something to do or I’ll find something for you.”  You see, there were plenty of jobs growing up in my house that needed doing and there was no attitude that a child couldn’t do them.  I grew up in a “teach-a-man-to-fish” sort of family, meaning if I didn’t know how to do something, you were taught and then expected to do it.  The things my parents would “find” for me to do were not what I had in mind when I had announced of my boredom.  They were not meant to thrill nor amuse me; they just needed to be done.  Here’s how that list would go:  1)  weed  2) clean out the toy shelves 3) babysit my younger siblings 4) iron my father’s shirts  5) match the socks.  Sometimes the list would vary with a sort of “Chore-de-Jour” based on the season or an upcoming family event such as a holiday or a snow storm.  Then I was offered the additional choices of shoveling the driveway or polishing the silver.  Ugh… one job worse than the other.  Living in a coastal community the weeding usually included long hours on your knees and many encounters with frogs and snakes that lay beneath the weeds you just tugged up (and you had better get the root or my mother would make you redo it).  The toy shelf job meant you were signing up for a week of work and had better be prepared to make some tough decisions about what toys you really wanted and what could be given away.  If truth be told, I’d usually take the babysitting job as that meant I could lay on the couch watching TV with my siblings and I was the boss.  Ironing my father’s shirts was true labor, boring, standing, and those shirts would be up for inspection later on.  And the socks – that was like as my dad called it, KP Duty, you sat and matched 100 white socks and 100 blue socks that all appeared the same but in some way were actually unique.  (This job we still offer to my children in their moments of boredom or when we deem they need a little “thinking time”.)

Yet in this time of childhood boredom, knowing that the choice was mine of either finding something to do or having my parents find it for me,  I found ways to fill the time.  Boredom led me some great thinking.  It lead me to observe – noticing things I might not have seen before, like how the puddle in front of my house was always moving and how the birds were always busy and appeared to be talking with each other.  It lead me to pretend – playing house, school, and pioneer people.  It lead me to create – making up our own games, playing with water, building things from items found in my yard.  It lead me to exercise – playing a game of tag, kickball, or riding on my bicycle. Being bored was a good thing for me and I think it is definitely under-rated.

This year I will not go out of my way to be a boring teacher.  Like always, I will try to somehow “thrill” and at times, I may even  “amuse” my students, but I will also understand that my job is not to do this all the time.  There will be down time, time when  children need to make their own choices as what they will do and not always look to the adult in the room for the solution.  Perhaps I will follow the lesson of my parents, “Oh you have nothing to do, here’s something for you…..”  It may seem a little cruel at first, after all  don’t I want to provide them with interesting puzzles, intricate word searches, challenging math sheets, meaningful content crossword puzzles – no, not really.  What I really want to do is to have them experience that time of quiet, of thinking, of being in charge of their own choices and how they will fill their bored time.  Following the line from the movie Field of Dreams, “If you build it they will come,” perhaps I can build the field and they can do the playing.   I provide the methods to observe, the materials to create, the places to play.  Maybe I can turn the idea of Bored Time into something that my students will look forward to, “Yippee, I’m bored!”  they will call and then go and find something to amuse and maybe even thrill themselves, (or others ) with.