I talked to a driver’s ed teacher for awhile yesterday, an attractive Hispanic woman who was sharing a hospital waiting room with me. She’s not in the public school system. She works for one of the small schools that teach driving to kids and adults who are not part of the public school driving curriculum. She talks to young adults all the time. They tell her that school is boring. They don’t enjoy their Spanish classes. They don’t enjoy much within the walls of their school.

I believe she is accurately sharing the opinions she hears. I have two very different responses to comments like these:

1) Who said it was supposed to be fun anyway? No wonder so many kids are having trouble keeping jobs and moving away from home. Young adults quit positions because, “my job wasn’t any fun,” or “my boss was too hard on me,” leaving themselves with no income and no back-up plan. I’m sure that’s not a lesson that schools intend to teach, but we may be inadvertently contributing to a lack of employment staying-power.

The idea that lessons should be entertaining crops up in education classes all the time. University professors emphasize making lessons “engaging.” Engaging and entertaining are close cousins. Newly minted teachers are encouraged to throw in that entertainment piece, the enjoyable activity that will somehow drive the lesson home. I am afraid we have been trying to “engage” our students for so many years now that students have come to feel they are owed a good time by all.

2) Our push to teach to tests really has sucked the fun out of school. When teachers don’t step off the track, but do bell-to-bell teaching of the core curriculum, we can turn students off by the lack of variety, even when we manage to work that fun activity into the lesson. Fun activity #34 for learning fractions may be 29 fun activities too many, given in too short a time. Breaks and variety do help to maintain student attention.

If items one and two above don’t exactly fit together, well, that’s the conflict in my response.