Only 2 percent said they were never bored. When Gallup asked teens in 2004 to select the top three words that describe how they feel in school from a list of 14 adjectives, “bored” was chosen most often, by half the students. A 2015 follow-up study found that less than a third of 11th-graders felt engaged. By high school, the number dropped to four in 10. But mainly, like the majority of my fellow Americans, I fell victim to the epidemic of classroom boredom.Ī 2013 Gallup poll of 500,000 students in grades five through 12 found that nearly eight in 10 elementary students were “engaged” with school, that is, attentive, inquisitive, and generally optimistic. What happened in those nine years? Many things. Come class, I spent more time playing Snake on my graphing calculator than reviewing integrals, more time daydreaming than conjugating verbs. I attacked each new project that year - a sketch of the water cycle, a history of the Powhatan - with the same evangelism.įlash forward to the fall of my senior year in high school, and my near-daily lunchtime routine: hunched over at a booth in Wendy’s, chocolate Frosty in my right hand, copying calculus worksheets from Jimmy and Spanish homework from Chris with my left while they copied my notes on Medea or Jane Eyre.

During my presentation, I shared my five-stanza rhyming poem about the swine’s life cycle, painted the species’ desert and taiga habitats in florid detail, and made uncanny snorting impressions.

I filled a poster as big as my 9-year-old self with photographs, facts, and charts, complete with a fold-out diagram of the snout. I devoted my free time before bedtime to capturing the wonders of the Sus scrofa in a 20-minute sermon. DeWilde, assigned my class an open-ended research project: Create a five-minute presentation about any exotic animal. For two weeks in third grade, I preached the gospel of the wild boar.

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