You know it’s coming. You have recognised the restless fidgeting, and the huffing and puffing. And then she finally comes out with it: “Miss, this is so boring; I am so bored.” Though you might not want to admit it, you understand how a pupil feels in this state. Boredom is a large part of day-to-day existence; research shows that the average person will spend five years of their lives feeling bored. (Suggestions that much of that time for teachers is made up of staff meetings, however, are yet to be tested empirically.)

What we do know is that we don’t enjoy being bored. It’s an emotion that’s often unpleasant, can make us feel frustrated and can even influence our behaviour in negative ways. This feeling of ennui has been linked to harmful habits such as comfort eating and procrastination - and, in more extreme cases, has been cited as a motive in crime sprees and murder cases.

As Erin Westgate, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Florida, points out in her research study Why Boredom is Interesting, a Russian man who stole an army tank and drove it into a local supermarket to steal a single bottle of wine explained his actions by saying he was, simply, “bored”.

In schools, boredom is often seen as a symptom of non-engagement, of wilful disobedience. A pupil saying that they are bored is usually taken as an insult.

Westgate sees things differently. She says teachers need to understand boredom as more of an alert system than a challenge to their authority. “Boredom is an emotion that signals we aren’t meaningfully engaged with what we are doing,” she explains.

Saying they are bored is, she argues, a pupil asking for help. And she says it is from that starting point that boredom should be interrogated. “First, what they are doing doesn’t feel subjectively meaningful to them. Just because something is obviously meaningful to us as adults or educators doesn’t mean it will be perceived the same way by students, and it’s the student’s perceptions that determine whether they will feel bored,” she explains.

“Second, students can also be bored because what we’re asking of them isn’t the right fit for their current ability to focus. This isn’t just a student’s current skill set but includes things like how tired a student feels, or if they’re distracted by other concerns going on at home and don’t have the bandwidth to pay attention in class.”

Teachers may well point out that a school does not really function in a way that would enable a teacher to react to these points. Of course, noticing when a child is disengaged is important, but adapting a lesson just to be something they might like doing? Or letting a child off a task because they are tired and thus bored?

It would be incredibly tough logistically to adapt a lesson for that individual (or, more likely, following your first adaptation, multiple individual lesson tweaks as pupils jump on the bandwagon), and doing so would come with a huge swathe of other issues, too. For example, many students would be savvy enough to feign boredom to get to do something they would prefer to be doing. And some teachers would suggest that boredom may in fact be a good thing.

On the latter point, they have some support. Teresa Belton, visiting fellow at the School of Education and Lifelong Learning at the University of East Anglia, says that while it’s difficult to justify the “encouragement” of boredom, it’s important that kids get bored - and be allowed to stay bored - because it helps them become independent and resilient.

“Most parents [and teachers] would agree that they want to raise self-reliant individuals who can take initiatives and think for themselves, but filling a child’s time for them teaches nothing but dependence on external stimulus, whether material possessions or entertainment,” she explains. “Providing nurturing conditions and trusting children’s natural inclination to engage their minds is far more likely to produce independent, competent children, full of ideas.”

Essentially, she advocates for boredom. And she thinks the individual will reap the benefits by being bored. “Children need inner resources as well as material ones,” Belton explains. “Qualities such as curiosity, perseverance, playfulness, interest and confidence allow them to explore, create and develop powers of inventiveness, observation and concentration.

Still, while many academics echo Belton’s view that boredom is an important emotion to experience, research has revealed the dismal effects that it can have on children. A 2014 study, Boredom and Academic Achievement: testing a model of reciprocal causation, followed 424 students at the University of Munich over the course of an academic year and found a cycle in which boredom resulted in lower test scores, which resulted in higher levels of boredom, which in turn resulted in still lower test scores.

The same study claims that boredom can also be associated with anxiety, impulsiveness, hopelessness, loneliness and depression, and concludes that researchers and practitioners alike “should focus attention on boredom as an important, yet often overlooked, academic emotion”.

This is an opinion shared by Westgate, who believes that “the best thing we can do is try to structure our classroom and lessons in ways that foster a sense of meaning and optimal challenge in our students”.

“I teach college students that even undergraduates struggle to pay attention or understand why they have to learn certain concepts,” she says.

She argues that tackling boredom is less about pandering to children who want to engage only with things they like, which is how some might have interpreted her earlier comments. Instead, it’s simply about good teaching. “Two great evidence-backed techniques I really recommend are scaffolding and utility value interventions,” she explains.

“Scaffolding involves scaling complicated tasks by offering lots of support early on and then scaling back that support as a student’s competency grows.

“Utility value interventions ask students to self-generate links between what they are doing in class and their own personal life goals. It’s a way of making what we are doing in class personally relevant to the student, and getting them to see the ‘utility’ of what they are doing by asking them to draw those connections themselves.”

Freeing children from distractions and other concerns is another method that frees up student cognition to pay attention in school, Westgate adds, noting that “it’s often hard to pay attention if you’re hungry, worried about problems at home or have concerns about stereotyping or belonging”.

And, if you can’t pay attention, “you’re more likely to feel bored in class no matter how good the teacher is”, she says.

Belton, coming at things from the other end of the spectrum, agrees that children do have to be helped out of boredom.

She suggests that offering a challenge or making general suggestions, rather than providing ready-made entertainments, or organised or prescribed activities, will help children to develop a sense of independence, initiative, of responsibility for themselves and resourcefulness. Essentially, if they say “I’m bored”, you challenge them to find a way not to be, she says.

“Children can be helped to move on from the “stuckness” of boredom by being challenged in some way, perhaps to do something familiar differently or see something differently,” she says.

“Maybe a different mood could be engendered by the playing of a certain piece of music in the classroom.”

Belton adds that parents have a role here, too. She says we need to ensure that young people get used to getting themselves out of boredom. “I would want to encourage children to enjoy periods of downtime when there is ‘nothing to do’, such as on a train or car journey,” she says.

“Such times make space for daydreaming, watching the world go by - observing the social world, and the natural and built environment, reviewing experience and feelings, developing an inner life and getting to know themselves.”

So being bored should be encouraged. Even a pupil expressing that they are bored should be encouraged. But how far a teacher should be encouraged to help that situation is slightly more controversial. It’s a good one to ponder next time you are bored.

Carly Page is a freelance journalist

This article originally appeared in the 17 April 2020 issue under the headline “Tes focus on...Dealing with boredom”