The Virtue of Boredom

I'm sure I'm showing my age to say that I came up in the kind of educational setting where you sat still, you listened, and you took notes. Most students today won't listen, can't sit still, and have no idea how to take notes, but it's not their fault.

I was one of the lucky ones. I had a high school teacher who had both chalkboards (again, showing my age here) full when we walked into class. When everyone had finished copying all of the notes on the first board and moved to the second one, he erased the board and continued adding more notes. That's how I really learned to outline.

Even in college, I had a New Testament professor who started his lectures with, "Roman numeral one...." I wrote quickly, sometimes taking up two rows at a time as my scrawling handwriting grew wilder and wilder. Everyone wanted to borrow my notes. At first I typed them, and then I figured if they really wanted my notes, they could go through the trouble of trying to decipher my handwriting. My professor thought it was a bit too generous of me to share my notes, but (1) I figured if they were too lazy to take notes, they were probably too lazy to read mine so it wasn't like they'd have an unfair advantage, and (2) they didn't grow up in my house where we received two hours of lecture/sermons from Adam to Jesus from my mother every time we got into trouble. I wasn't learning the New Testament from scratch; I just had to make note of his questions and how he had things organized. That being said, I had enough of a background to appreciate his scholarly insights, whereas those students without that background were probably sitting there wondering why the main character got killed in the first book.

By grad school, I was a wiz at analyzing text and outlining chapters. I had to be; I'm a very slow reader, and it's impossible for me to read forty pages of non-fictional material in one evening. I remember we had one perfectly awful textbook that was written in prose form with no subheadings or bulleted items--nothing to call our attention to what was actually important. Fortunately, I don't recall the name of the textbook (it was rented) or the author, so I don't feel too bad about saying that it struck me as incredibly egotistical--and sadistic--for this educator to write a text book in prose form--using first person--as if he expected students to just soak it up like a best-selling, don't-wait-for-the-movie thriller novel.

I was going somewhere with all this....

Oh, boredom.

I first started noticing, a little over a decade ago, how college classes were pushing "activities." Teachers were no longer teachers; they were "facilitators." I remember being told students learn better from each other, which is actually a scary thought when the students' combined knowledge on the subject being taught could fit on the front side of one piece of notebook paper and still have plenty of room left for illustrations. But, I digress.... What I'm saying is that these "activities" that are meant to "engage" the students (jumping through hoops is more how I thought about it) just seemed more like musical chairs and not actually very conducive to learning. I can honestly say that I learned more from lectures in my high school years than I did with a $70K activity-riddled education.

In this post-modern chaotic era in which we live, this blueprint that educators have adopted to prevent boredom and make sure students are "busy" doesn't actually seem any more conducive to learning than the old boring way. For one thing, I don't think that this blueprint is good for all students. I preferred a quieter setting, more time for deep thought, and a less frenzied pace. While many students may prefer being social, the format ignores the students who would do better without it. At the end of my educational experience, I felt that if I weren't ADD before, I was now.  This teaching format seemed to constantly intercept a student's attention and act as an obstacle to deeper knowledge. In this frenzied post-modern "musical chairs" form of education, when do we have time to wool gather or form questions that weren't already superficially obvious?

I recall one of my grad school professors saying when one child fails, the whole class fails. All students are being herded together so that their thoughts aren't really exploratory or ground-breaking, but, rather, group think is encouraged so that the result is a homogeneous classroom that is peer-policed and pushed to think in one direction. Socialism in the classroom.

Which brings me to where I was going with all this.

Boredom. Most people are afraid of it. I've always needed time away from people. I have times when I feel my eye twitching and the skin stretched over my skull beginning to vibrate, and I know I'm going to snap if I don't have time to just stop and let everything go still and quiet. I will even turn off music as I drive and just let my thoughts float freely before they slowly begin to organize themselves. I love driving by myself because I can talk to myself and sort things out. It's the place where I feel free.

While I've always known that I truly need this quiet time, this alone time, in order to just cope, I also realize that it's more than that. In order to create, I need to detach myself from things that are constantly vying for my attention, whether it's a TV show I want to binge-watch or people chatting about the latest fads. When I was younger, I think my mother was actually afraid when I would go off on walks by myself or spend so much time quiet and alone in my room. She probably worried that I was moody and experimenting with teenage rebellion-related paraphernalia, but the truth was that I was a writer, and I needed this quiet in order to be creative.

And it goes even further than that. If I had never been bored, I would have never felt the need to make up stories or draw or create anything. I would have never experienced this void that I began to fill with art and writing and introspection. I truly believe that boredom is the mother of creativity. Which is why I find it hard to work on my creative projects (which I truly love to do) during the holidays, when I'm facing one social event after another, or during times when I'm distracted by my own activities or those of others, such as politics over the past few months.

It occurs to me that, if such things were to continue to hold my attention indefinitely, I would probably never finish another book or make any real headway with my art. I would also not feel compelled to learn or to become a better person because I would be too busy and distracted to realize that I was lacking in anything. Any mental capacity for learning or evolving spiritually would be buried under an avalanche of media and busy-ness. In order to improve or learn or create, I need that white space, a place to put this new knowledge or self-guided activity.

So, in a roundabout way, that explains my absence. I'm also currently plotting two novels, which I hope to be able to talk about as they develop.

TTFN.