Middle School Teacher Considers "Bored and Brilliant"

The author of Bored and Brilliant distinguishes between the mind that wanders because you're bored with some tedious activity, and the mind that's "bored" because you crave the next "hit" or "like." In one, your mind is free to make up stories about what you might do, what author Manoush Zomorodi calls "autobiographical planning"; in the other, you are tethered to a device that allows others to pull your chain. One kind of boredom is creative; the other kind comes from an appetite ramped up by software engineers to draw our attention back to their products.

The tyranny of messaging isn't new. The Islamic poet Rumi lamented 800 years ago, "I have lived too long where I may be reached." Zomorodi, drawing on experts and on listener responses to her Bored and Brilliant podcasts from NPR, reports references to the phenomenon of boredom as far back as ancient Rome, though Charles Dickens first coined the English word in Bleak House (1853). Others referred to it as "nausea" (Sartre), "idleness" (Kierkegaard), "tamed longing without any particular object" (Schopenhauer), and "the noonday demon" that gave rise to sin according to early church fathers (Zomorodi 16).

In one eye-opening experiment, subjects found more "out of the box" solutions to a problem after 20 minutes of reading aloud a list of phone numbers. The "executive" brain, occupied in executing this tedious task, left the rest of the mind free to daydream.

That's what made heaven out of summer afternoons of hot, sticky, smelly, repetitive work in my dad's chemical company. Tightening lids on hundreds of soap bottles, pressure washing dozens of 55-gallon drums, bleaching the bleachers at South Decatur High School -- I was rapt in my own imagination, writing scripts, imagining alternative futures for myself, replaying scenes from my life with different outcomes.

[Photo: West Chemicals in Atlanta, where Huff Road meets Ellsworth Industrial Blvd, 1972, site of many years' productive teenage boredom for me.]

Prodded by long-distance runner Peter Sagal, host of NPR's comedy show Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, I've unplugged while I'm out on my bike. Before I ever had a smart phone, I wrote plays, songs, comedy sketches, and curriculum for my students during my long rides. That all stopped during the years when I tuned into news, Pandora, and Peter Sagal. Now I use the phone only to record the ideas that have come to me while my body has been engaged in cycling.

Here's another reason to appreciate the Episcopal Church. With experience, we come to know the responses, collects, creeds, and prayers by heart. You can tune in; but much of the time, a line in Scripture or the sermon sends your imagination off on a tangent -- something to write about, or a solution to a classroom problem, or remembrance of someone you need to visit. Suddenly you're bulleting ideas in the bulletin and you miss the cue to stand for the hymn. When the closing prayer sends you out into the world to love and serve the Lord, you're ready!

For this teacher of Middle School English and Drama, the key takeaways are

• To read slowly from a page and to write by hand, requiring the mind to filter material, gets better engagement and retention than electronic substitutes (48-49).
• The way we read screens, hopping around from sentence to picture to hyperlink, prevents us from close reading. Readers who used an eBook reported being just as interested in the story as those who read from paper, but were far less able to identify the order of incidents in the story (47).
• "Priority" is a singular word. Zomorodi cites the idea of Essentialism developed by author Greg McKeown, who shakes his head over a mayor who claimed to have "32 priorities" for her new administration (155). This made me think what English activity has priority: analysis of grammar? appreciation of literature? writing essays? writing fiction? building vocabulary? I see a clear line, now: Everything in the course is feeding the students' store of ideas and references for writing.
• Boredom and silence that is attentive to incidental sounds around you can feed creativity. There's another kind of meditative silence, directed inward, that shuts creativity down.

Zomorodi previews the conclusion of the book early on:

If our children are constantly engaged with bits and bytes of information, what is happening to their ability to imagine, concentrate deeply, reflect on past experiences, decide how to apply those lessons to future goals, and figure out what they want for themselves, their relationships, and life (5)?

That looks to me like a lot of what my kids should be writing about, one way or another, all year. Another assertion by Zomorodi mirrors our school's mission statement: "We crave reflective time; we seek balance; we want a life full of joy and curiosity" (11).

Zomorodi, Manoush. Bored and Brilliant: How Spacing Out Can Unlock Your Most Productive and Creative Self. New York: Picador, 2017.