Why being a kid is boring.

Since the last time I posted, which was like, before the invention of covered wagons, a lot has happened in my life. I will update you now via bulleted list, since it is my favorite type of list.

• I have gotten my first job. I teach middle school science.
• My love an I have celebrated one year of being together. Not including the time we dated in high school.
• I live at home with my parents, my grandma, a cat and a dog.
• I have discovered I don’t hate onions.

Okay. With that out of the way, I suppose you may be wondering why it is that being a kid is so boring. But before I do that, I want to clarify a few things.

Being a kid shouldn’t be boring.

Being a kid should be so fun and exciting that as a child you occasionally pee your pants from over-emoting. Also, being a kid shouldn’t be hard or lame.

BUT. Being a kid is sometimes really boring and hard and stressful. And I think I know why. It’s like, the best, most wonderful, least stressful time a human being ever gets.

Preparing for this school year, I was able to review old lesson plans and look through textbooks and determine everything that the kids need to learn this year. I’m thinking, “Science. Awesome. It should be so fun.” But what I am finding is like, long tedious writing assignments, boring books to read, lame videos that are older than me to watch, and ugly posters to hang. I realized over the course of this discovery something very important:

This is why kids hate school.

Kids hate learning because we learn meaningless and irrelevant things. Kids hate watching videos because they are narrated by robots and intended for audiences twice their age. Kids hate reading because the books they read are completely beyond them and have nothing in them they can relate to. It’s not that being a kid is actually boring. It’s that the adults in their lives make it boring. The three main rules for kids are sit still, be quiet, and work hard.

Kids aren’t supposed to sit still for that long.

Kids aren’t supposed to be quiet all the time.

And kids have to be taught that hard work is rewarding.

I am challenging myself to really ask “why is this important and how does it relate to my kids” before it ever crosses my desk or ends up on my whiteboard.

It’s sort of like when Paul says that Christians have to be “all things to all people”. As an educator, and as a human being that interacts with kids, it is SO important that I am able to make things as fun and exciting as they should be for kids. So as I’m thinking of this, I realized too, that being an adult is also boring. And it shouldn’t be. I’ve come up with a new life philosophy that I’ll at least strive towards.

Life is too short to be bored. If something I need to accomplish or a way I’m living my life is boring to me, then I will make it more exciting. If my Christian walk is boring, I’m not doing enough. If a book is boring, I’m not reading the right one. If a person is boring, I’m not listening to their life story closely enough.

Let’s make life exciting.

That is all.