My two kids (1st and 6th grade) always complain that they are bored at school. In a recent survey, 2/3 of US high-school students say they are bored in class every single day. About 30% of the students indicate they are bored due to lack of interaction with teachers and 75% report material being taught is not interesting. I believe our culture's obsession with external, fast-paced entertainment - TV, movies, the Internet, video games - play a big role in increasing students's boredom.
3/02/2007
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8 comments:
The problem isn't the input kids are getting outside school.
Educators need to catch up and give kids more and better input in school in a form that is relevent to their daily existence.
i agree that tv, internet and movies play a big part in boredom in class although the contents in the curriculum is very boring.
i like physics, or i use to and having taken the class for over a year ive grown to dislike it. the things they teach us in school arent very interesting. i find studying physics on the internet is far more interesting and fun.
Kids have been trained to be passive consumers of entertainment and not to be actively involved in their environment. No wonder they're "bored". They don't know how to handle it when they're asked to focus.
I'm not sure that students ARE more bored that some earlier time. Without trend data, it is really hard to say. According to my parents, everyone in their generation was bored with school- couldn't leave it fast enough and most did! The other problem is in surveying this group- teenagers are devilishly hard to survey. Anyhow, I make a living off of generating statistics and I can tell you that much of the statistical information out their is either bad information or is easily misinterpreted. Caveat emptor is advised when consuming statistics! Except mine of course ;)
kids are the future , get them involved now and taking some responsability for there surroundings.
As an educator myself, I, too, thought at one time that TV, Internet, etc. all payed a part in cildrens indifference to learning. But look at the 21st century trend that these things play in OUR life. We have the responsibility to show our children how these tools work to benefit us in our learning. Hence digi-classroms and inquiry-based learning. My classroom kids aged 7-8, use the internet to research, inquire, compare and contrast all the information and mis-information out there etc. They are way too busy to be bored because they have huge input into what we are learning. They design the questions and we co-construct the learning. There are times the bell goes for play or lunch and my kids groan! Just food for thought!
Being a HS student, I have to agree. I'm bored in almost all of my classes. The only one that I'm not bored in is history, and that's because the teacher interacts with the students, relates it to now, gives us things to think about... But then there's math, where his brother is the teacher, and he gives us no reason to learn the stuff, so everyone gets bored. I think that not only do we find the material uninteresting, but we also see it as irrelevant to our lives. If something is irrelevant to you, you're not going to want to pay attention to it very much.
From a teacher-Kids aren't the only ones who are bored. Because of the pull to make sure that everyone succeeds we have to slow the class down to the pace of at least the most average kid in class. It used to be that kids could be tracked into classrooms with a higher pace and more interesting subjects but there is little of that today. We are far to worried about self esteem and not worried enough about providing tools that work in real life. I could go on with this soapbox but I better stop here or the Political Correctness patrol will be up in arms.
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