HELP! I Am A Boring Teacher!

Teaching high school can get boring. I am blessed to teach six out of seven periods a day at a school that is adamant about giving teachers as few preps to teach as possible in a day. My school tries to honor teachers’ wishes about what courses they teach each year and most teachers prefer to stick to the same one or two courses year in and year out so that they become experts with the curriculum they are teaching. In a world of constantly changing educational leadership, trends, and standards, my school is a refreshing oasis of, “if it isn’t broken, don’t try to fix it.” The only down side to this is that after five years of teaching junior English (American Literature, writing, and rhetoric) at either generals, honors, or Advanced Placement levels, I felt reading The Great Gatsby one more time might put me in my grave. It is one of my favorite literary works and is standard reading for junior English, but reading it thirty times in five years (not counting the reading of it for lesson planning purposes) is more than anyone should be exposed to a single text. However, as teachers, this is often what happens. We become experts in a specific curriculum, it becomes our comfort zone, and we stay there forever. Not only was I experiencing boredom with the curriculum, but I was passing that attitude along to my students. When I realized what was happening to me at the end of the 2009 school year, I went straight to my principal to confess what a terrible teacher I had become. I begged her to let me do something different.

Now that I have reflected on this tendency of myself as a teacher, I understand I am not a terrible teacher and I am more careful not to let myself sink into that rut. I have a three-year attention span. I can only tolerate a teaching situation for three years before I find that I need to move on to new things. This has been an important building block of my relationship with the educational leaders in my life. 

Since I have come to this realization about myself, I see it in others too. As the experienced veteran teacher in my building, I encourage new teachers to notice this cycle in themselves. I sit teachers in years three to five of their career down and ask how they are feeling about their work. Are they as excited about coming to school as they once were? Do they feel their students are learning as much from them as they did a year or two ago? How do they feel about this particular group of students versus groups of students from the past? Boredom manifests itself in a variety of ways among professionals: isolation, resistance to new experiences, slacking on professional responsibilities, negative talk, haphazard planning, increased problems with student discipline, etc.

I have found a variety of ways to challenge myself so that I stay fresh in the classroom and those have come from realizing that there are three types of boredom for teachers. The first is the day-to-day boredom that comes from working with the same material multiple times in a day. The second is the day-to-day boredom resulting in working with the same people each day. The third is the boredom resulting from doing the same job year in and year out. Addressing these three types of boredom requires mental discipline and self-reflective practices.

In my present teaching context, I work with students in college-level courses who are considering a career in education. I was surprised at how many of those students said their biggest concern about becoming an educator was repeating themselves six times a day. The Professional Learning Community (PLC) I am attached to presently has similar concerns in our weekly meetings. They bemoan repeating the same lesson six times or grading the same written assignment 180 times or reading the same article six times. This is an easy problem to solve! Lessons are about skills not content.  This is much easier for me to say now than it was ten years ago. The Great Gatsby is book that teaches frame narrative, symbolism, purposeful syntax, tight plot structure, and strong characterization. It is representative of American literature from the 1920s. However, there are several works of fiction that embody those narrative structures and represent that time period. I taught that work of literature thirty times in five years because I was a young teacher and I thought I had to. I lacked the creativity to find another piece of literature that accomplished those things. Now as an experienced teacher, I tell others to write lesson plans around skills and pick multiple pieces of content to use to teach those skills. In my PLC, we will often have a lesson plan for a day of class, but use three different texts to teach those skills. Or if we are covering writing skills with our classes, we will have multiple sets of writing prompts for our students, so we can grade different topics from our students. Planning lessons in this manner will not only help to alleviate boredom, but it keeps students talking about the curriculum (“Oh, you read this in her class today? I read something different! Yours sounded really good…mine was lame. Let me see yours, I want to read it.” I know that seems very Pollyanna of me, but it is surprising how much students talk about class outside of class if given a reason to do so.) This method of lesson planning stretches a teacher to find the best resources available for lessons and to fully comprehend what those lessons are teaching.

The second type of boredom is also easy to solve. Engage with different people. Human nature dictates that we are drawn to focus our attention on people who are like us: from the same neighborhood, who we’ve met before, who we feel comfortable with, who look like us, etc. There are tons of sociological experiments and theories on this topic, but no matter your opinion on the issue, it happens, and it happens to make for bad teaching. We focus on one group of students while neglecting other groups. We get tired of having the same discipline conversations with the same students, giving the same corrective feedback to the same students, or getting the same answers from the same students. The irritation we feel towards the students is felt by the students and they act accordingly towards us. The entire classroom dynamic goes down the drain and by April the people in the classroom are equally tired of each other. However, if the teacher in the room deliberately engages with different people, this situation can be alleviated.  Is the class working on group projects this week? Circulate the classroom, but sit down and converse with a different group of students for an extended time each day. In class discussions, be mindful to seek extended answers from different students. Acknowledge (in a quiet conversation) to that student getting the same discipline conversations over and over…ask the student why! Address the cause of the behavior rather than the behavior itself. This goes for colleagues as well. Eat lunch with different people regularly. Spending planning time with different people. Sit with different people during faculty meetings. Extending the circle of students and colleagues with whom you converse is going to extending your points of view. This is a good thing, don’t be afraid of it.

The last type of boredom is much harder to address. Teachers must actively reflect and seek out ways to overcome the year-to-year satiation with their teaching assignment. Here are some things I have done over the years to work through this issue:

1.)   Change curriculum. I went from only teaching junior English to looping with my students. I had the same group of students from tenth through twelfth grades. I taught three different English curriculums with those students. This was an amazing experience.

2.)   I let teaching take a backseat to other professional practices. I became a mentor teacher. I had college interns. I was a department chair. I did consulting work outside of my school with other schools. I served on district curriculum committees. I served on union/district evaluation committees. I became involved in active unionism. I become involved in extracurricular organizations with my students. I become involved with school leadership initiatives like planning parent involvement activities, writing the school improvement plan, working on school accreditation.

3.)   I changed content areas. I left the English classroom and went into an elective classroom where I teach students who wish to become teachers.

4.)   I changed grade levels. I focused my concentration on a majority of freshmen students rather than upperclassmen.

5.)   I changed demographics rather than working with successful, independent, college bound students, I began to work with student of concern and at-risk students.

Ultimately, dealing with professional boredom comes down to realizing you have complete control over it. I am not bored, I become boring. I allow myself to be repetitive in my work. In my latest battle with boredom, I am choosing to focus on my personal and professional lives. I am challenging myself to cultivate two talents I had been neglecting: art and writing. I am writing LinkedIn articles like this one, I am also writing a book about educational reform with three other colleagues. I am an art blogger and I spend my evenings moonlighting as an abstract artist. I embrace the cyclical nature of my boredom and I believe firmly that, “This too shall pass.” I hope before I become boring again I’ll have the opportunity to finish the book and sell a few paintings. I certainly don’t have my next step planned, but I will share it when it comes along.

But the most important advice I can give on avoiding boredom is: TAKE ADVANTAGE OF ALL THE FUN THAT COMES YOUR WAY! If something fun is happening on campus, be a part of it! Chaperone dances, go to athletic events, dress up for spirit days, and participate in the pep rallies. School can be a really fun place, embrace those moments! Students will love you for it and you'll enjoy doing it.

Amanda McCallister is the Co-Founder and National Advisor of Sigma Alpha Sigma, Inc a non-profit organization dedicated to building educational excellence and opportunities for student leaders.