Best teachers inspire pupils to learn
"At present, the universities are as uncongenial to teaching as the Mojave Desert to a clutch of Druid priests. If you want to restore a Druid priesthood, you cannot do it by offering prizes for Druid of the Year. If you want Druids, you must grow forests."
-- W. Arrowsmith
Is it possible to learn something and be bored at the same time? I suppose so -- picture a student memorizing dates for a history exam. Here's the rub: While bored, your mind is elsewhere, scattered and meandering, and thus unavailable for learning that requires thinking. It's learning versus boredom, and the odds go to boredom.
Now consider that most work is mostly boring. Jobs are designed to be uneventful. You don't create jobs that you aren't sure someone can do; no, your goal is to create a nice, tidy position that can be tidily filled by someone for whom the tasks are second nature -- meaning without thought, meaning bored.
What got me thinking about learning versus boredom was talking with Dr. Sam Intrator, a professor of education at Smith College and author of the important, inspired book "Tuned In and Fired Up -- How Teaching Can Inspire Real Learning in the Classroom."
Intrator did a fascinating piece of research, sitting through 124 high-school English classes taught by one excellent teacher, looking for instances of intense learning -- the tuned-in and fired-up kind. (Imagine volunteering to go back to high school to sit through more than 100 classes. That's taking a bullet for your research -- 124 of them -- earning him a researcher's Purple Heart.)
He writes: "After observing 124 classes and conducting hundreds of hours of interviews during my research, the moment that for me evokes the character of this project occurred one day in May. The classroom door had just closed behind the last student to leave room 36 on this day. As the door clicks shut, Mr. Quinn lifts his arms above his head like Rocky Balboa. He stands there, arms stretched to the heavens, an unopened yogurt in one hand and a handful of student papers in the other, and he lets out a primal whoop: 'Yeah!' "
This was the wake of one of the episodes of "inspired learning," or as Intrator puts it in the book, "moments of luminosity." I asked if his research had taught him how to switch on such inspired learning. He replied: "We talk like it's mystical, but we can create opportunities for engagement. There is an epidemic of boredom in schools. The first challenge is to snare attention, and the odds are against you. These are kids with 3,000 songs on their iPods and 400 channels on TV, and they are used to being in control of their attention. You have to make it important to them, figure out the relevance to themselves."
OK, but can he now turn it on, I wondered -- for instance, when giving a speech? He sighed and said: "Oftentimes it comes from the audience, a question someone asks that galvanizes the group. But a speech is a download, a transmission that's the most flawed way to gather the audience into a space where they feel generative."
And that gets us to the essence of what Intrator learned about inspired learning: It comes from generating ideas, not having them handed to you. You set people up to experience learning, not to be taught. He said: "We're hungry to feel some higher claim than learning components of a subject. We yearn to feel the quality of being gathered together for something we believe is important." Isn't that a useful definition of leadership?
Of the 124 classes Intrator observed, there were 22 instances that he felt qualified as intense learning experiences. That's not quite 20 percent. So even a great teacher, aiming for intense learning, falls short four days out of five. But, ah, there's that one.
Which brings us back to work and its own epidemic of boredom. We need to understand that being asked to do something difficult, to undertake an experiment or any assignment with an uncertain outcome, is a gift. To have every day that way might be impossible, for uncertainty can become the status quo and can itself become tiresome. However, each of us deserves to go to work knowing there's a chance of something marvelous happening, a possibility that the day just might hold a moment of luminosity.
Dale Dauten is a syndicated columnist. He can be reached at dale@dauten.com. 