Yawn

A colleague recently remarked that boredom is part of the educational process: not all learning can be made "entertaining," and there are times when mastering a subject means doing a lot of dull work (repetition, dealing with "dry" texts, reviewing previous lessons, etc.).  The "discipline" in discipline, in other words.  I was thinking the other day, though, of the kinds of boredom inherent in teaching that the instructor, too, has to overcome.  At the most basic level, most of us eventually develop a stable repertoire of courses that we are expected to offer on a regular basis--the lower-division survey course, for example--that, because of our other professional obligations, cannot be revised extensively on any regular basis.  (For those of us with heavier teaching loads, having courses that eventually don't need extensive prep time is essential, especially when you hit that phase of your career when you are also expected to do a lot of service work.)  That's particularly the case if the works on the syllabus were designed to "talk" to each other, in which case removing one can cause aggravating domino effects down the line.  Similarly, it often becomes clear that some works consistently resonate with the local student population and others consistently don't, which means that the former tend to appear more often on one's syllabus and the latter less (or not at all); this leads to situations like teaching Jane Eyre in four classes out of six, as I once did many years ago.  (I'm a big fan of Jane Eyre! Great novel! But there are limits!)   And some of the repetitive drills that bore students also bore the instructors.  

I suppose some might argue that you should be upfront with the students about this, in the interests of authenticity, or the production of empathy, or the demonstrated of a shared (lack of) affect, etc.  A professor from my undergraduate days was, in fact, rather notorious for "being himself" in that manner, and had a habit of telling students things like "wow, I just don't feel like teaching today"; while I gather the students may have made sympathetic noises in class, the noises they made outside of class sure as heck weren't.  ("Great," one of his students said to me one day, "I guess we can leave now?") Putting aside the useful reminder that the student responses to personal revelations that you see may not be the student responses that you don't, the "discipline" in discipline pertains here too.  While the reasons for boredom may be different ("I've taught this poem so many times I can recite it backwards while balancing on one foot on top of a hardboiled egg"), the necessity of modeling how to do the work remains.  There is always something that can reanimate an overfamiliar text--a discussion session, a question, a serendipitous article or monograph (on a totally different subject, even), a new pedagogical technique...

 

Comments

[jseliger]

Have you read Bryan Caplan's book The Case Against Education? https://jakeseliger.com/2018/03/12/the-case-against-education-bryan-caplan/

It may be that boredom is really part of the signaling process: if you can tolerate it, you're likely unusually conscientious.