I remember, as a child, being bored. I grew up in a particularly boring place and so I was bored pretty frequently. But when the Internet came along it was like, “That’s it for being bored! Thank God! ….”
It was only later that I realized the value of being bored was actually pretty high. Being bored is a kind of diagnostic for the gap between what you might be interested in and your current environment. But now it is an act of significant discipline to say, “I’m going to stare out the window. I’m going to schedule some time to stare out the window.”
— Clay Shirky in an interview with Sonia Saraiya on Findings.com
We need a little boredom, to let our minds wander and thus to spur creativity.
Zoë Pollock, on The Dish, highlights the thoughts of Clay Shirky and the response of Nicholas Carr on loss of space for boredom in the internet age.
Jonah Lehrer’s has an excellent interview on Fresh Air about his new book on how creativity works, called Imagine.
There are three key components:
Relaxed state of mind: Like when you’re in the shower and your mind is free to wander. It’s another reason not to be afraid of a little boredom, and setting aside personal time time in the day.
Hard work: But the relaxed mind needs to have something to work with, and that’s all the hard work that came before. When you’re relaxed the mind processes things in different ways, it mulls over the things you’ve been thinking of, and makes unexpected connections.
Uninhibited, childlike perspective: You need to allow your brain the opportunity to be creative. All the hard work requires good focus and persistence; things the pre-frontal cortex develops the ability to do (and something we train it to do) during adolescence. But the ultimate, creative insight often requires you to turn off that part of the brain so you can thing uninhibited, creative thoughts.
Molly Backes, an author of young adult fiction, considers the question from a mother about her teenager, “She wants to be a writer. What should we be doing?”
Her first answer was, “You really do have to write a lot. I mean, that’s mostly it. You write a lot.”
But then she thought about it, and that’s where it gets really interesting:
First of all, let her be bored. …
Let her be lonely. Let her believe that no one in the world truly understands her. …
Let her have secrets. …
…
Let her fail. Let her write pages and pages of painful poetry and terrible prose. …
Let her make mistakes.
…
Let her find her own voice, even if she has to try on the voices of a hundred others first to do so. …
Keep her safe but not too safe, comfortable but not too comfortable, happy but not too happy.
At the end she posts a picture of her collection of forty-two writer’s notebooks.
It’s a wonderfully written and well considered post that I’d recommend to anyone trying to teach writing and language, particularly if you take the apprentice writer approach. And, I’ve always been a great believer in the power of boredom.
Backes’ advice more-or-less summarizes my interpretation of the Montessori approach: create a safe environment and give students the opportunity to explore and learn, even if it means a certain amount of struggle and failure.
Jungle play area at the Skudeneshavn Primary School in Karmøy on the west coast of Norway is another great example of creating an environment that offers students the opportunity to explore.
It’s also interesting to note how differently writers and other experts think, yet how much their practices overlap. Mathematician Kevin Houston also recommends writing a lot when he explains how to think like a mathematician, but his objective is to use full, rigorous sentences to clarify hard logic, and less to explore the beauty of the language or discover something profound about shared humanity.
The more you learn about something, the more detail reveals itself. It’s a bit like walking down a single path of a fractal pattern. Wherever you go, no matter how much you know, new branches open up before you. Within every little thing is an infinity of discovery.
It’s one of the reasons why I don’t accept, “It’s boring,” as an excuse for not wanting to do something. Boredom is when you don’t use your imagination. You can never get bored because of all of the interesting things in world.
To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
I still have not tried my fractal writing exercises, but I think I’ll try to work one into the next cycle. Perhaps start with describing a tree, then a leaf (or a section of bark), then cells under the microscope.
Or perhaps a better subject, since we’ll be looking at organ systems, would be a fish.
The mind tend to wander when working at repetitive tasks that don’t require much brain processing. So the brain just switches over to thinking about long-term things. There is even a specific part of the brain, called the “default network” that starts up when we zone-out. That, at least, is what I summarize from looking at some neuroscience research by Malia Mason and others (2007) on wandering minds.
What’s interesting is that the default network tends to be used for “certain kinds of self-referential thinking, such as reflecting on personal experiences or picturing yourself in the future” (Zimmer, 2010). That means introspection. Introspection is the point of Personal World, so it follows that we should want our students’ minds to wander during Personal World.
So how do we design the Personal World time and environment to encourage daydreaming? Repetitive tasks aid mind-wandering, as will anything that is rote that does not require acute cognitive focus. Raking the garden, doodling should be encouraged, in fact, anything that encourages boredom.
I would think also, that reducing the cognitive load would also be beneficial, which might also mean no music. Yet music helps isolate the individual, particularly when they’re using ear buds. Perhaps quiet, “boring” sounds would be best, coming a shared radio so students can’t choose to listen to something else. Of course, if you’re listening to the music on your mp3 player then you tend to tune out the songs anyway so maybe it all falls out in the wash.
Of course this could all be malarkey, based as it is on a single study, so I’ll end with the words of caution that coms at the end of the article:
Although the thoughts the mind produces when wandering are at times useful, such instances do not prove that that the mind wanders because these thoughts are adaptive; on the contrary the mind may wander simply because it can. – Mason et al., 2007.
A few of my students have been complaining that we don’t do enough different things from week to week for them to write a different newsletter article every Friday. PE, after all, is still PE, especially if we’re playing the same game this week as we did during the last.
So I’ve been thinking of ways to disabuse them of the notion that anything can be boring or uninteresting in this wonderful, remarkable world. A world of fractal symmetry, where a variegated leaf, a deciduous tree and a continental river system all look the same from slightly different points of view. A counterintuitive world where the smallest change, a handshake at the end of a game, or a butterfly flapping its wings can fundamentally change the nature of the simplest and the most complex systems.
“Chaos is found in greatest abundance wherever order is being sought. It always defeats order, because it is better organized.”
— Terry Pratchett (Interesting Times)
There are two things I want to try, and I may do them in tandem. The first is to give special writing assignments where students have to describe a set of increasingly simple objects, with increasingly longer minimum word limits. I have not had to impose minimum word limits for writing assignments because peer sharing and peer review have established good standards on their own. Describing a tree, a coin, a 2×4, a racquetball in a few hundred words would be an exercise in observation and figurative language.
To do good writing and observation it often helps to have good mentor texts. We’re doing poetry this cycle and students are presenting their poems to the class during our morning community meetings. It had been my intention to make this an ongoing thing, so I think I’ll continue it, but for the next phase of presentations, have them chose descriptive poems like Wordsworth’s “Yew Trees“*.
