Breaking news: high school students bored in class

by Jonathon Morgan (Subscribe to Jonathon Morgan's posts) Feb 28th 2007 2:30PM

A recent survey conducted by Indiana University finds that high school students are bored in class. This is not shocking. I was bored in high school. Chances are, you were born in high school. Every movie, book, TV show, stage play, comic strip, magazine article and blog post about high school usually, in some way, references the fact that kids are rarely, if ever, excited about learning between the ages of 14 and 18.

However, the study also finds that many have considered dropping out -- news which could be more alarming. In fact 75% of the 81,000 students who participated said the material wasn't interesting, with an additional 21% saying that they'd considered dropping out.

The solution, according to Ethan Yazzie-Mintz, project director of the Indiana University's Center for Evaluation Policy, is to focus on a new teaching style -- including more discussion and debate groups in the classroom -- along with a shift in the way schools discipline students who skip class. Instead of suspending students after the fact, Yazzie-Mintz thinks school leaders should talk to students to find out why they cut class in the first place.

What do you think? Is your child's high school effective in keeping him or her engaged in the learning process?

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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

SKL 3-01-2007 @ 12:03AM

I think it would be more helpful to make the curriculum / assignments flexible enough to accommodate kids with a broad spectrum of aptitudes, interests, and maturity levels. By the time you're a teen, you may be many years ahead of or behind the kid sitting next to you in a particular subject.

Required subjects are the worst - they are dumbed down in an attempt to accommodate all kids. Which means the majority are rolling their eyes for the better part of the period. Take ninth grade "civics" class. We sat through a boring presentation of a textbook that insulted the intelligence of most kids, and enlightened nobody. The kids whose intelligence / maturity was at the level of the textbook were those who couldn't have cared less about any lesson - that's why most of them were at such a low level in the first place. It would have been better to bring up a particular real-life issue, provide basic facts and materials, let the students address the issue through independent thought, research, and writing, and then have the teacher sum up the various student outputs. While this would be more work for the teachers, they might actually enjoy it a lot more, and thus it would be less drudgery for them.

Another alternative is simply not requiring attendance in classes that are not appropriate for a given student's ability / maturity level. For example, they could let kids test out, attend more or less advanced classes (e.g., a sophomore could attend English IV if test scores allowed), or substitute individual projects for a semester course. They could also encourage early graduation, conditioned on a kid's attendance at a full-time college the following year.

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