Why your Kids Think School is Boring and Stressful
Have you ever taken the time to search up what kids think about school on google? The top suggestions from searching “why is school…” are ‘Why is school boring’ or ‘why is school stressful’.
If you have a child, think back to the times you’ve asked someone attending school how their day was. I’m willing to make a bet, and I’m confident that I’ll win the bet, that hardly any kid has responded with more than a deflective ‘alright’ or ‘okay’.
In fact, you don’t even need to ask your children, think back to your own school life and just think about what things you enjoyed. Hardly anyone will ever look back in retrospect and claim calculus to be the thing they enjoyed most at school.
But this seems obvious right? Of course, people would be more inclined to enjoy the social aspects of school more than content or learning. So we have a situation where you go to school to enjoy the friendships, and the whole learning part is just a nasty side effect you have to deal with.
What’s strange to me is that from an early age, kids are natural learners who are curious about almost anything. Have you ever had a conversation we a 3-year-old? The only thing they ask is “why?”. Yet we have managed to transform this curiosity into conformity so much that they no longer ask ‘why is the sky blue?’ but ask ‘why is school boring?’.
To put it mildly, this frustrates me.
We can’t keep saying that kids are failing school because the schools are failing them.
As of right now, I’m trying to give as many kids the chance to seize the opportunity that learning can give to people. I don’t mean just learning content, I mean learning about themselves, what makes them tick, what drives them forward.
It’s not easy to properly help someone learn. It’s more than just lecturing information at someone. You need to engage, adapt, mentor, assess, inspire, relate, condense, listen, respect, understand their story and what they want to do, and most importantly, make it a good experience. The reality is that kids don’t learn from people they don’t like.
School is boring, but it doesn’t have to be. School is stressful, but it doesn’t have to be.
It only takes 1 person to change your life, it’s just a matter of finding that champion.
