“Boredom was everywhere in my world, and if you asked the children, as I used to do, why they felt so bored, they always gave the same answers: they said that the work was stupid, that it didn’t make sense, that it already they knew it”. They said they wanted to be doing something real, not just sitting around. They said the teachers didn’t seem to know much about their subjects and were clearly not interested in learning more. And the kids were right: their teachers were all just as boring as they were.” john taylor cat against the school

The dictionary describes boredom as ‘the feeling of being bored by something tedious.’ At six years old my son had no words to sum up his school experience, the closest he could muster was to give me a description of the feeling it caused him. This feeling was ‘boredom’. Furthermore, he often told me that he did ‘nothing’ during his school day. I knew this couldn’t be entirely accurate, however I felt this was a reality for him. Over time I came to the conclusion that if he had the wisdom of experience, he would have communicated something like: ‘learning in school has little meaning for my life, therefore I can’t participate in the activities that come my way, therefore I live in this state of ennui that makes me feel bored.’

“We ask children to do for most of the day what few adults are able to do for even an hour. How many of us, attending, say, a lecture that doesn’t interest us, can keep our minds from wandering? Almost none .” john holt in How Children Fail

Instead, every time my son talked about soccer, his eyes would light up. He would clue me in on anything I wanted to know on the subject, from the rules of the game to the top scorers in the premier league table. He pressured me to take him to games for his favorite team and spent every spare minute practicing his soccer skills outside. When someone had some information about soccer, he would stop and listen adding his opinion. He read the latest soccer magazine from cover to cover and saved every penny to buy the soccer cards that he religiously collected. When we are passionate about a subject we are much less inclined to boredom. This was one of the main reasons we started homeschooling almost eight years ago.

Characterizing our homeschooling approach as non-schoolers who are lifelong learners, I recently found myself falling into the trap of providing a school-style approach to learning during a weekly lesson with my daughter (never homeschooled) and five of his friends. With the help of another mom, we take on how these science-based lessons work. All the children wanted to attend these lessons and they could leave at any time, in other words, they wanted to learn about science in these lessons. For the first six months the kids seemed engaged as we followed Usbourne’s Science book, working our way through basic science experiments in the kitchen. However, in recent months they seemed to lose their enthusiasm. As his interest waned, I lost heart at these meetings. Disheartened, I could hear myself coercing them into it, even raising my voice to be heard over their disinterested chatter.

“The greatest enemy of learning is the teacher who talks” john holt in How Children Fail

My instincts warned me that these lessons had lost their charm. I found I couldn’t go on any longer, this way of learning had turned into lessons that went against everything I had come to believe. We hold a meeting with all of us sitting on the floor in a circle. During this non-judgmental environment, the children found a place to express their lack of connection to the science we had been attempting. Through this dialogue, a phoenix idea emerged from the circle, taking shape as we excitedly envisioned the unexpected shape of our future scientific meetings.

In mock Harry Potter fashion, we now arrive every Monday morning and symbolically enter our Room of Requirements, where each individual is working on a project they have selected to study. A project can last a week or several months. Currently, the boys are building a potato rocket launcher, one of the girls is mastering a deeper understanding of gemstones, and the remaining two girls are building their own dollhouse, complete with solar-operated lighting and a water feature. This process demonstrated to me the power of listening and listening without judgment, none of us could have imagined that this would be the result.

“We learn to do something by doing it. There is no other way.” john holt in Show yours

One of the main keys to the success of integrated learning is ‘doing’ and through doing we learn. There is another crucial element to successful integrated learning: learning must be in “context” for the learner. A subject described as “in context” are those subjects that arouse the interest of the student. I had been assured that we were ‘doing’ the experiments, unfortunately the lessons explored lacked ‘context’ for the children. Randomized experiments, grouped more or less by theme, had no meaning in the lives of the children. One of our lessons involved an experiment that showed that ice melts at a different rate when salt is applied to it, an interesting fact, but how does that fit in with our lives here in Africa? In Canada, this experiment would be more likely to be in context, especially during the winter when snow needs to be cleared from driveways with minimal effort.

Formal teaching typically approaches learning in reverse, initially teaching a ‘concept’ which is then followed by ‘doing’ and ‘context’ is relegated to last place and often completely neglected. There is a hornet’s nest of problems associated with this unnatural approach to learning. The biggest problem is that often the lessons taught have little relevance to the children’s lives, resulting in detachment from the subject and ultimately boredom. By investing the learning experience in which children can choose what they want to learn, they feel inspired and motivated. With the context firmly in place, embedded learning is more likely to be the end result.

When initially presented with a new learning experience, we naturally look for previous hooks we may have, asking the question: ‘Have I tried doing this or something similar before?’ ‘How was the experience?’ ‘How successful was I?’ ‘Where did I fail? ‘What I learned?’ John Holt, in How Children Fail, believes that we learn by doing and the prerequisite for this is being able to imagine ourselves doing what we do. We have to imagine ourselves swimming, skiing, playing a certain song on the piano and before taking our first step in learning to walk. This leads to a trial period of learning, doing it, learning from our mistakes, and trying again. At this point we may need some instruction from someone who has mastered this experience previously, it makes sense that we watch her do what we were trying to do, and then we can try to do it ourselves. It is important that it is the student, not the teacher, who leads the learning process at the pace that best suits him, as long as this is in place, context will continue to be king.

My 5-year-old daughter was worried about leaving her toys and bed behind when we explained we were moving to a new house. Without a hook for her to attach to this unknown experience, she was left with feelings of confusion and worry. Before her first ‘meaning of moving’ hook was on her, if we had described the abstract act of moving house to her, it is very likely that she would have little interest in this experience out of context. Unfortunately, this is what is regularly applied in a school setting, teaching subjects that have little context in a child’s life. We may have been able to capture our daughter’s interest by giving her an account of someone moving house in story form. Possibly, by identifying with the person in the story, she has become more committed. Although she would say that this is a whisper from actual experience. Successful resolution of ‘what it means to move house’ would involve a full understanding, in the child, of what it feels like and what it means physically to move house. It is through the actual experience of moving, the making of moving in context, that really engages the integrated learner in the child, providing the full meaning behind what it means to move. It was this ‘making of moving in context’ that resolved once and for all the doubts that my daughter had about her bed and her toys that accompanied her when she moved to another house.

“When you teach a child something, you take away forever the opportunity to discover it for himself.” jean piaget

Learning doesn’t always have to involve being there physically. I have been reading Harry Potter aloud to my nine year old son. Those of you who have read the books will know the character Sirius, the Godfather from Harry Potter, who transforms into a large dog at will. In a separate conversation with my daughter, I told her that there is a star in the sky called Sirius that can be found in a constellation known as The Great Dog. It was a classic moment of integrated learning when she herself made the connection between what we had been reading in Harry Potter and the information she had just obtained. Going a step further, she commented on JK Rowling’s intelligence in basing a character on the name of a star and connecting this character, through her actions in the book, with the name of her constellation. In addition, she has created an additional hook to build on in the future: what it means to create and name characters when planning to write a story.

The learning process is sacred to the individual, whatever their age. Hijacking an individual’s natural learning approach amounts to theft and is something we must guard against at all costs. When this happens, students are left with boredom as their only line of defense. In a learning environment where boredom prevails, used as a barometer, it will signal that somewhere in the learning approach something went wrong. When we entrust the learning process to the learner, “context” is a given, the learner naturally selects what is meaningful to him, and the poisonous drip of disconnected boredom is eliminated.