Boredom is a Teacher

The boredom at Juniper Root is brimming with potential.

Downtime is a necessary element in self-directed education. That downtime can be uncomfortable for us adults to experience, conditioned as we are by our culture of never-ending productivity and stimulation. But it is from those seemingly dull moments that the most brilliant things emerge—spontaneous conversations in which more information is exchanged in a matter of minutes than could be covered in an entire week of classroom learning, children jumping up with a new idea and running over to the art table to bring it into reality, a couple of students working together to complete a number chart-the older child urging the younger child to keep going because they’ve almost finished, an older child picking up a book to read aloud to a younger friend, a group of younger students deciding to create a water park on the playground and working together to accomplish their goal…

We adults often want to jump in just before the good stuff happens. I’ve been guilty of this offense more times than I can count: I notice some children looking like they’re not sure what to do next and so to help ease their discomfort (which is mainly my own), I toss my two cents in. Which isn’t a terrible thing, but if I do so repeatedly, they start to look to me for a solution any time the discomfort of not-knowing arises.

We build all sorts of bridges around here.

It took me years of practice to remember how to look inside of myself when I wasn’t sure what to do next. Children pick up this skill pretty easily, but they can easily forget if an authority is always there telling them what to do. One of the more challenging and rewarding aspects of my job is simply holding space for children to move through that discomfort in order to remember what they’ve known how to do all along.