Gifted Kids and the Dreaded "B Word"

Parents/caregivers and educators are often the recipients of comments from children and adolescents that begin like this… (insert whining...) “I’m bored”. As a parent and a teacher, I have heard this phrase countless times over the years and have often wondered about the best way to handle it. For sure, I can tell you some great ways not to handle it. My mom, like many other moms, (me included), usually responded with this retort, “Boring is as boring does. If you’re bored, I can find something for you to do. There’s a closet to clean…” I’m sure you get the idea.

In a school situation, the “B” word is rarely met with joy by teachers. Many teachers take personal offense to the word; often they assume that students mean they (the teachers) are boring, the work is boring, or school in general is boring. And, in my experience, gifted students often offer this as a criticism, sometimes with merit, sometimes without.

But what is behind the “B” word? Why are children bored easily? The reasons for this may vary. At home, children may be accustomed to constant stimulation. Screens, an overabundance of toys and gadgets, and constant enrichment scheduling give children and adolescents little time to learn to manage downtime, and their default setting is to claim boredom when they have unoccupied moments. What would happen if we let them sit with their boredom?

In school, students may not be sufficiently challenged, and this is often true for gifted children. In often quoted research from the University of Connecticut entitled “Why Not Let High Ability Students Start School in January?” Dr. Sally Reis and her colleagues suggested that “approximately 40-50% of traditional classroom material could be eliminated for targeted students in one or more of the following content areas: mathematics, language arts, science, and social studies.” And “when teachers eliminated as much as 50% of the regular curriculum for gifted students, no differences in the out-of-level post achievement test results between treatment and control groups were found in reading, math computation, social studies, and spelling.” What a novel concept – allowing gifted students to begin the school year in January, thus eliminating boredom!

Of course, there may be other reasons that students employ the “B” word. Some may have a mental health condition such as depression, anxiety, divorce in the home, or post-traumatic stress; others may have a learning difference. Perhaps the teaching methods and learning preferences don’t match. Maybe students are simply disconnected from the subject matter and unmotivated by their learning environment. In some cases, “boring” may even mean “I do not know enough about this material to be remotely interested.” And, of course, some students use the “B” word as a substitute for “difficult” or “frustrating”.

Whatever the root causes, parents and teachers need strategies. The first thing parents/caregivers and educators must do is to evaluate the physical and mental health of the child. Eyesight, hearing, sleep, and nutrition play an invaluable part in learning; often children are not aware of their deficiencies and cite boredom to avoid engagement or absolve their behavior. Likewise, children who do not feel that they are loved and belong may use the word “bored” as a coping mechanism (at home or in school).

Sometimes children and adolescents cite boredom as the reason they are not doing well in school. While this may be true, perhaps they lack adequate executive function skills such as planning, focus, test-taking skills, impulse control, etc. These can and must be taught!

And of course, sometimes school IS boring. If this is the case, parents/caregivers and educators need to involve the child in pinpointing the problem/s and devising solutions. Some detailed questions to pose at conferences include:

When are you bored?
Why do you think this happens?
What could (reasonably) be done about this?
What if the boredom cannot be resolved? Here children/adolescents might say, “I don’t know.” A great follow up question might be – “If you did know, what would you suggest?” (You’d be surprised at how many great ideas kids have, and this question gives them the power to be a solution-finder. They often amaze us and themselves).

Finally, one of the greatest antidotes to boredom is curiosity. Alice Parker once said, “the cure for boredom is curiosity. Fortunately, there is no cure for curiosity.”

Much research has shown that unresolved periods of boredom often spark curiosity. The human brain is wired for novelty and exploration, and boredom might just be the missing catalyst for new discoveries. If that is true, it serves a useful purpose. Maybe sometimes we need to let our children sit with their boredom. Who knows what might happen?

As always, I welcome your thoughts. Together we grow.

By Jackie Drummer, Past President, Wisconsin Association for Talented and Gifted

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Almost every week we see headlines in the news lamenting the current state of students and education. Titles such as these – “Chronic Absenteeism Continues to Plague School Systems,” “Why Do Students Spend So Much Time on Their Phones?,” “Should Phones Be Banned From the Classroom and Will That Improve Test Scores?" – are prolific and often worrisome. This often leads to proposed solutions, some which undoubtedly have been tried (both successfully and unsuccessfully) in the past. Why do educational leaders (and politicians) continue to “reinvent the wheel” by proposing and utilizing the same (but re-branded) solutions to student learning problems over the years, dropping one after another in favor of a latest “trend” that will supposedly fix everything? Why aren’t we getting results? I feel the above questions are related and may have an easy solution, one that has produced many studied and practical results. It is a solution that I have experienced in my decades of teaching as well. Recently I read an article in K-12DIVE entitled Drawing connections between art and science can improve academic outcomes by Briana Mendez-Padilla. K-12DIVE is a news outlet that provides business journalism and in-depth reporting on trends in the pre-kindergarten through 12th-grade education sector. In this article, students in Mississippi had persistent low test scores until the school decided to make changes and incorporate the arts (and even artists) to work with and alongside the sciences. As a result, test scores rose significantly, as did social interactions between students. In this article, the author points out that today’s teachers are often competing with technology for kids’ attention. Just taking away technology doesn’t insure greater learning, nor does ignoring it. Teachers need to utilize what attracts kids to technology if they want better attendance and better learning. The author points out that students learn best in different ways (as we know); some students have auditory learning preferences, some kinesthetic, and some visual. Some learn best by reading, others not. Many of today’s students are also heavily into music, movement, and video. This is evidenced by their “plugged in” behaviors and their preference for online creation and viewing. It then stands to reason that the more ways a teacher can present material or allow students to learn using their technology, the more the students will be involved in their learning. Learning or showing evidence of learning can be much more than drawing a picture of the plant cycle (straight out of the science book) or making a shoebox diorama, practices of the past. As educators, we need to move our practices into spaces that our students inhabit. Some simple examples about different ways of learning/demonstrating wave action using science and the arts together could be students acting out wave action through dance using their different music choices (singly or in groups). Teachers could also, using light, prisms, and paints, show how colors can mix and affect how we see our world, and then critically analyze the use of light and color in water portrayed in historic and contemporary works of art (found online, of course). Or students could create music that they feel mimics wave action, mixing and remixing existing music or creating their own. Many of them have technological expertise and a great desire to use it. By teaching our curriculum in their world, using the arts as a vehicle, will, many believe, generate renewed excitement in learning. Finally, in order to develop curricular connections between science and the arts, administrators have to deliberately set aside time for curricular collaboration. Collaboration isn’t something that just magically happens; it takes time, interest, and creativity to connect them, a marriage of will and skill! Professional development time should be used to develop curricular connections, therefore enhancing teachers’ skillsets. Better teaching makes for better student outcomes. Coordination between the arts and sciences shouldn’t take much of a monetary investment; it can often be free, and the results can be priceless. Many free connections exist within community arts organizations, and they can enhance a school or school system. I know this because of my decades of experience as a visual arts specialist and arts coordinator in Milwaukee’s Lincoln Center of the Arts. The arts and sciences have much in common. In fact, through the Renaissance period, the arts and sciences weren’t two separate fields. They were one! They have many connections. Let’s put them back together using today’s technology! See a need for this in your child’s school? Share this article (and others) with them. For more information I direct you to the following articles. https://artsintegration.com/what-is-arts-integration-in-schools/ https://www.kennedy-center.org/education/resources-for-educators/classroom-resources/articles-and-how-tos/articles/collections/arts-integration-resources/what-is-arts-integration/ https://www.edutopia.org/topic/arts-integration/ - Dal Drummer, WATG Board Advisor

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