The Learning Spy - David Didau

Jan 02, 2016

For I have neither wit, nor words, nor worth, Action, nor utterance, nor the power of speech, To stir men’s blood: I only speak right on; I tell you that which you yourselves do know

Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Act 3, scene 2

Teaching is a profession with an odd, uneasy relationship with boredom. At once we are almost never bored, but seem to always run the risk of being boring. Teachers seem to find their subjects and what their students do endlessly fascinating. In fact, our enthusiasm runs the risk of boring anyone except other teachers, and even then at times. Writer and hispanophile Gerald Brenan cautioned, "Everyone is a bore to someone. That is unimportant. The thing to avoid is being a bore to oneself." Indeed. If ever I'm in danger of boring myself then I really do have nothing to say.

One of my favourite works on boredom is Milan Kundera's great novel, Identity. Kundera tells us, "There are three kinds of boredom: passive boredom: the girl dancing and yawning; active boredom: kite-lovers; and rebellious boredom: young people burning cars and smashing shop windows."

We all feel passive boredom at times and perhaps this is more important than we realise. The philosopher, Walter Benjamin said that, "Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away." If we're forever being distracted, we will never pursue anything to mastery. This pursuit is the boredom of kite-lovers. Most of us possess a particular 'kite' we love. For some it is golf, for others crocheting. For me it is education. My capacity to pursue an idea must, I'm sure, seem exceedingly dull to some of my long-suffering friends and family members. In fact, my daughter said, on the publication of my most recent book, "Daddy, next time can you write about something interesting?" And, of course, what she means is, something interesting to her.

Anything complex outside our immediate experience can seem dull. F. Scott Fitzgerald suggests that boredom is something we need to acclimatise to early on: "You’ve got to go by or past or through boredom, as through a filter, before the clear product emerges."

Boredom, Kundera says, is something of a luxury:

I’d say that the quantity of boredom, if boredom is measurable, is much greater today than it once was. Because the old occupations, at least most of them, were unthinkable without a passionate involvement: the peasants in love with their land; my grandfather, the magician of beautiful tables; the shoemakers who knew every villager’s feet by heart; the woodsmen; the gardeners; probably even the soldiers killed with passion back then. The meaning of life wasn’t an issue, it was there with them, quite naturally, in their workshops, in their fields. Each occupation had created its own mentality, its own way of being. A doctor would think differently from a peasant, a soldier would behave differently from a teacher. Today we’re all alike, all of us bound together by our shared apathy towards our work. That very apathy has become a passion. The one great collective passion of our time.

This is the idea that boredom stems from a lack of connection, a rootlessness search for entertainment and distraction. George Eliot expresses a similar thought in her novel Middlemarch:

If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the best of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.

It's the same variety of boredom which prompts students to ask for 'a fun lesson' and complain that anything which requires effort and is not immediately exciting is 'boooring!' This leads to the vandalism of complex ideas, the preoccupation with fun and engagement that so bedevils school as a microcosm of wider culture. As teachers, we are perhaps guilty of being complicit in "burning the cars and smashing the windows" of our subjects in order to entertain and appeal to our students' jaded palettes. Everything should be bite-sized, easily digested and full of sensation, leaving us "well wadded with stupidity."

When relating the dying days of his grandfather, Jean-Marc, one of the narrators of Identity, says,

I had just turned fourteen, and my grandfather – not the cabinetmaker, the other one – was dying. There was a sound coming from his mouth that was unlike anything else, not even a moan because he wasn’t in pain, not like words he might have been having trouble saying, no, he hadn’t lost speech, just very simply he had nothing to say, nothing to communicate, no actual message, he didn’t even have anyone to talk to, wasn’t interested in anyone any more, it was just him alone with the sound he was emitting, one sound, an “ahhhh” that broke off only when he had to take a breath. I would watch him, hypnotized, and I never forgot that, because, though I was only a child, something seemed to become clear to me: this is existence as such confronting time as such; and that confrontation, I understood, is named boredom. My grandfather’s boredom expressed itself by that sound, by that endless “ahhhh”, because without that “ahhhh” time would have crushed him, and the only weapon my grandfather had against time was that feeble “ahhhh” going on and on.

Sometimes the need to be heard outweighs any value our utterances might have. I recognise this. Writing can, sometimes, be an "endless 'ahhhh'" into the void. Debating the difference between educational ideologies might be such an "endless 'ahhhh'". But as long as anyone feels the need to read and respond to these exhaled thoughts, there is reason enough to carry on.

If you find educational debate boring, for God's sake, do something, anything else. It's not for you. I have no problem with others finding my enthusiasms dull, after all, I'm equally bored by some of theirs. But I cannot imagine taking to Twitter to communicate my fervent hope that no one talk about football, or Patagonian politics just because I happen not to be interested. Why tell anyone? Football fans and Patagonian politicians would be rightly confused and irritated by my intrusion. There's nothing wrong with finding a thing tedious, but some opinions are best kept to ourselves lest we ourselves become a bore. It's a low blow to say that when people are bored it is primarily with themselves, but often it's true.

Maybe the variety of boredom we feel is what marks us out and distinguishes us from others. French writer and art critic Edmond de Goncourt said, "There are moments when, faced with our lack of success, I wonder whether we are failures, proud but impotent. One thing reassures me as to our value: the boredom that afflicts us." The impotent attempt to ridicule other people's passions and shut down discussion is not the type of boredom I would want to be associated with. That's not to say I want to endlessly take part in dead-end debates; arguing about ideas - good or bad - rarely changes minds. (You only have to read through the comments on this post to know that.) But I will continue to speak my truth.

The real reason I don't care about ostentatiously communicating my ennui about subjects in which I have no interest is because they don't threaten me. Maybe those at pains to tell others what they find boring do so because they actually feel threatened? If you have nothing to contribute, proclaim yourself bored. The philosopher, E. M. Cioran, noted that what's true and important is often uninteresting: "If truth were not boring, science would have done away with God long ago. But God, as well as the saints, is a means to escape the dull banality of truth." Maybe you need to escape the dull banality of truth? Fine. But don't bore me with how much the truth bores you.

Finally, German intellectual and vociferous opponent of Nazism, Theodore Haecker advised that, "The one sure means of dealing with boredom is to care for someone else, to do something kind and good." Instead of being publicly bored with education debate, why not do something kind and good instead?

Other useful (and interesting) blogs on this subject include Boredom by Toby French, Dangerous Conjectures by Horatio Speaks and Can a false choice be an object of research? by Greg Ashman.

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Varieties of boredom