school is boring

I’m trying to figure our what the difference is between younger students (like the grade 4 class I was with a year ago) and slightly older students (like the grade 9 and grade 10 classes I’m with now). Obviously, I can’t generalize and say that the classes I’ve seen are representative of those age groups, and in terms of high school classes, I’m mostly talking about math, which is just one subject. However, I do know, from hearing people talk about it, from working in classrooms, and from my own experience as a child and teenager, that there is a big difference between elementary school students and high school students.

I think that, in general, kids want to learn. Children are ridiculously curious. If they see anything new, they want to know what it’s called, where it comes from, how it works. They want to play with it, experience it, touch it, climb it, taste it. As we grow older, we don’t behave like this as much. We don’t automatically try to play with every new anything we come across. Sometimes we want to, but we’re generally more reserved.

This seems to be a big difference between elementary school students and high school students. Elementary school students want to learn. They misbehave, they get distracted, they sometimes give up when their work is to hard, but from what I’ve seen, they mostly buy into the idea of getting an education. High school students, on the other hand, don’t always. They are more likely to see school as something they have to do. Sometimes they find the subjects interesting, but their main reason for doing the work is that they need (or want) the marks. There are, of course, exceptions. There are young children who feel that school just takes time away from what they’d rather be doing (climbing a tree, playing a video game, looking at cool bugs), and there are teenagers who get a real sense of satisfaction from producing a solid piece of work, but this does not seem to be the norm.

So is there just a point in our lives when we decide that we don’t want to learn anymore?

I’d say that’s unlikely. I don’t think it has very much at all to do with the students. Learning is generally fun. School, on the other hand, is often boring.

It’s an interesting coincidence that students become less enthusiastic to go to school and learn around the same time that school and learning stop being a time of moving around and talking and playing games and discovering ideas and concepts, and turn into a time of sitting at a desk and taking notes, and then trying to apply those notes to questions in classwork or a homework assignment. An interesting coincidence, but not at all surprising.

Why is it more fun to be an elementary school student than to be a high school student? It’s probably because elementary school is fun, and high school isn’t. If elementary school isn’t fun, the students won’t pay attention, so teachers do everything they can to make their classes interesting, engaging, and interactive. High school students, however, should be mature enough to participate even if they’re bored out of their skulls, so their teachers get angry or penalize them if they don’t pay attention.

To be fair, some students do find the actual learning part of high school interesting. Not even just the marks, but the actual learning. Coming up with original ideas and figuring things out. The problem, I think, is that there is very little of this in high school. This is especially true in math classes, but I would guess it’s true to varying degrees across all subjects. Thinking is not really cultivated. Students might be told to think if they are having trouble, but I would guess that they are really being told to think back, and try to remember what they were told. What they should really be doing (in a math class, when presented with a question they don’t know how to answer) is looking at what is being asked, seeing what information is given, and figuring out the answer from there. They should not be trying to remember what steps they took the last time they answered a similar question, or flipping through their notes to find an example that matches this question.

It would take quite a bit of effort to convince me that most high school students would not enjoy really learning something. However, it isn’t enough to, every once in a while, give students a real math problem to figure out. Learning is fun, but it is frustrating. It’s difficult and time consuming and a lot of hard work. Once all of that is done, it’s incredibly satisfying, but when students are only given the opportunity to try something like that every once in a while, especially when the rest of the time they’re mostly just following steps, they probably wouldn’t want to try it.

So I guess that’s the difference between younger students and slightly older students. Younger students are being entertained. They’re doing the playing and experiencing part of learning, which is fun, so they want to do more of it. As they become older high school students, they don’t get to play as often. In order to learn, they have to listen to instructions that they then need to follow perfectly. No wonder they aren’t excited about it.