Boredom

I used to think of boredom as A Bad Thing. When my children were at school, I remember one Easter break when Ali had a task to do over the course of a week. His teacher had asked him to record every use of water in the family in the form of a tally chart. So, every time someone in the family went to the bathroom, or made a cup of tea, or washed up, Ali was supposed to mark a chart which listed all the activities.

Of course, we quickly realised what a pain in the neck the exercise was going to be, and decided to try to do one day as accurately as possible, and then extrapolate the results for seven days. We were at their grandparents' house, I remember, and we tried as well as we could to work out how many times we made drinks or used the bathroom. I declined to cross question my parents-in-law about specifically what they had been doing in the bathroom, and just guessed.

At the end of the day we had a neat form with a lot of tally marks on it, but boy, it was boring in a must-pay-attention-to-do-this-properly even though it took hardly any brain to do.

We multiplied the results by seven to get a week's figures, and then looked at the second part of the exercise... to translate the results into a bar chart. This infuriated me, because the exercise was such an empty one. You couldn't get any different information from the bar chart than you could from the tally chart - and both were pretty useless at telling you how much water had been used, as there were no quantities involved at all.

I could think of so many ways in which the exercise could have been made easier, more interesting, more relevant, and it infuriated me that the teacher had set the exercise without really a thought to the impact on families who didn't think to do one day and multiply the results... or the fear which it might engender in a child who forgot to do the observations at all and tried to make them up, simply because it was such an uninspired exercise.

The main exercise would still have been tedious, but if there had been a translation chart for the amounts of water involved in each activity (say 250 mls for a drink, four litres for washing up, etc) then the bar chart could have approximated the quantity of water used for each activity. Or the children could have simply been asked to think which activity over the holiday had taken the most water... whether washing, or swimming or drinking... something which made them think.

This sort of activity engenders what I think of a poisonous boredom, because it fills you with ennui, and means that altough you don't actually want to think about the necessity of filling in the next tally on the chart, you can't properly think about anything else or you will fail in the task. This is the boredom I recognise from my own experience of school, when the lesson didn't challenge or interest me, but I dared not think about anything else in case it was my turn to answer a question next.

The other sort of boredom I have gradually come to recognise as positive. The boredom that overtakes you when you want to be doing something but can't think what to do, is the sort of boredom that makes you get off your sofa and find something interesting to do. It's the sort of boredom that overcomes me when I hear football commentary on the television, when I will do anything -- ANYTHING -- to get away from the sound. It harks back for me to wet, cold afternoons stuck in the living room at my grandparents' house, listening to the tv blaring away on a Saturday afternoon. It's a motivator, in the end, because you have to use your initiative and find something to end the boredom.