Learning lasts when teachers are 'brave enough to be boring'
- Joanne Jacobs
- Nov 10
- 1 min read
Brett Benson used to be a fun teacher, he writes on his SOL in theWild Substack. "My classroom was loud, colorful, fast-moving." But students didn't remember much. Now, the seventh-grade World History teacher is proud to be boring.
"Real learning demands focus and time not constant novelty and high energy," he writes. In his classes, students are "working. Thinking. Recalling. Writing. Connecting. Wrestling with ideas long enough for them to stick."
There's lots of routine, because "predictability frees up working memory for actual thinking," he writes.
He doesn't try to "out-entertain screens." He tries to be consistent and clear.
Good for him! It used to be obvious that, to write (well) about anything, you had to understand that thing. Putting your thoughts into writing was a test of how well you yourself knew the matter in question. You might, in fact, discover how you felt about something (an issue in history, a novel or story or play) by having to write about it--with all the thought that that necessitated.
Already in the mid-Seventies, when I was in high school, some teachers started asking us to "make posters" or "come up with a skit" to demonstrate learning, instead of the usual paper. We were scornful. That sort of dumbing-down wasn't real education! But it must have been easier to grade--a…