Bored and Uninterested


Most kids complain about how boring and/or meaningless most of the stuff they are taught at school is. There are the usual and well known reasons: teachers who barely know the subject, another set that doesn’t really care about the subject or the students, text books that are totally useless etc etc.

Things don’t improve when you go to college either: apart from the above reasons, many lecturers/professors teaching professional courses resent the fact that their students will start with higher salaries than they make after years of experience.

Is there any hope of improving things at either end then? Or is the only way (at least theoretically) to increase teacher salaries? Even if that were possible (which it isn’t anyway, because parents will be up in arms if school fees are raised), I realized that kids would still feel school is boring and/or useless when I read these lines by Roger Schank:
 “I was a pretty good teacher if I do, say so myself (and many of my students say exactly that in my forthcoming book (Teaching Minds: How Cognitive Science Can Save Our Schools)). But I couldn’t make algebra interesting to those who are bored to death by it. And, I couldn’t make literature interesting to those who think reading nineteenth century novels is tedious and irrelevant. In fact, I avoided teaching introductory programming my entire career because there was no way that I could make that interesting. Now, there are people who can make these subjects interesting (Saul Morson and Chris Riesbeck, both at Northwestern do exactly that in their respective subjects.) But they have an advantage. No one makes students at Northwestern taken Russian Literature and no one makes them takes Introductory Programming either. Motivation matters.”

Motivation sure matters. If a kid doesn’t plan to be a doctor, chances are no matter what you do, he still wouldn’t care about biology. This also explains why school teachers can’t do much (beyond a point) to generate interest in the subjects they teach.

The corollary to the above is then kids at college, especially the ones doing professional courses, should care about and like the subjects they study. But as anyone who has been to college can tell you, that ain’t true. Is that because students are studying just to get a job, not out of interest for the subject?

Since that certainly isn’t far from the truth, does it mean there is no way to create interest in a subject at any point during a person’s education cycle? Which would be sad since it implies we can never do great research work in India…and that’s even without the problem of the Indian mindset of not accepting errors or failures (Because research is all about trial and errors).

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