You’re Boring

I have heard it a few times.

“This is boring.”
“I’m bored.”
“You’re boring.”

Most teachers have.

What I remember is how differently the people around me responded — and how each answer landed at a different depth.

Dalke was a military medic who became an art teacher. He looked at the student and said, without missing a beat:

“If you were more interesting, you would find me less boring.”

Petzold taught science and kept the books. She had a gentler answer:

“Well, you see, sweetheart — when I got my teaching degree, it did not come with an entertainment license.”

Both deflected with humor.
Both were right.
Neither went very deep.

Howland went deeper.

He was my mentor. A master artist. He is gone now, though he still lives in my teaching and in the way I look at a room.

When a student said, “You’re boring,” Howland said this:

“You’re bored because you are still young and you have not yet developed an inner life. When you do, you will begin to see the things around you with eyes of wonder. You will find the world interesting.”

Joseph, our IB coordinator, once brought me something he had read — that if you cannot sit quietly alone with yourself and your thoughts for more than ten minutes, you are demonstrating that you have nothing interesting to offer the world.

Howland and Joseph were saying the same thing from different directions.

Boredom is not a problem with the world.

It is a problem with the interior.

Then there is Greg.

Gregory Martens was a cobbler before he became a printmaker. He came to my eighth grade classroom, told stories about shoes and faith, and handed us old leather. My students turned his shoes into papier-mâché monsters. He displayed them in his shop.

Then the chemicals in the leather took his bone marrow.

He pressed on.

He became a professor of printmaking, an internationally exhibited artist, a man who made something out of everything.

At one of his exhibitions, he hung a quote attributed to the Prophet Muhammad:

“If the world is to end tomorrow, plant a tree today.”

Boredom is not a student problem.

It is a human problem.

Howland knew.

Greg lived it.

Plant the tree.