Musings with Maggie: Boredom

Ms. Burt, I’m bored.” I hear this from time to time in my classroom. I heard it on the very day I was writing this. In my early days of teaching, that phrase hurt my feelings. I thought I wasn’t able to reach children in the way I’d hoped. I thought I didn’t understand them, or that there was something about me that wasn’t captivating or motivating enough. After years of reflection and experience, I know none of that is true. I have great relationships with my students. They do learn, and they do have fun. The fact is, very few of us, even adults, truly know how to slow down anymore. 

We live in a world of constant stimulation. Our attention spans are the length of a TikTok. We scroll on our phones while watching TV. As a child, I clearly recall spending hours on end creating entire worlds in our backyard, climbing a magnolia tree and writing songs perched atop her branches, reading novels and imagining each scene in detail, writing stories about whichever role I was playing that day, and choreographing elaborate routines to my older sister’s vast CD collection. Here we are, in 2025. I’m mindlessly scrolling away most evenings, and an alarming number of children are, too. If I, a fully grown pre-internet adult, have been completely taken in by screens and noise, how can we expect a fully digital generation to manage this challenge? 

This is not an essay on the perils of screens and social media, but rather a musing on the merits of taking breaks from it. The benefits of boredom, and the value of quiet moments. With an unrelenting bombardment of sensory input in our lives, do we give ourselves enough opportunity to ponder, to feel and to create? Do we not have to sit with ourselves long enough to see what might come from within? Are we collectively as imaginative as generations past? I fear we may not be.

In recent years, I have often quipped that I don’t write songs anymore because I’m happily married and I don’t have any heartbreak to write about, but I’m not sure that’s the reason. Maybe I don’t write songs anymore because I forgot how to be still and quiet. Maybe I have to remember how to listen to what is within me. 

Now that I no longer take my students’ declarations of boredom personally, I sometimes have a conversation about it with them. “Boredom is good for you!” I say. They don’t believe me, but I go on anyway. “If you’re only focused on putting things into your brain, how will you ever know what might come out of it?” 

Sometimes I will sneak it right into a lesson plan. “Try listening to this song with your eyes closed. Do you see any pictures in your head? Do any words come to mind? A feeling? A memory? Try sitting in silence now. Do you hear anything from your inner voice? Can you draw a picture that comes from your imagination or something in nature?” Once, I told a class my mother’s family didn’t have a television at all until she was five, and it wasn’t in color until she went to college. Their shock and horror overshadowed any potential lesson to be learned. 

I won’t pretend to have answers for the challenges facing kids in the digital age. But I do believe leading by example is effective, and change that comes from within often radiates outward. I know I would benefit greatly from a little more time spent in analog. 

One day not too long ago, I was watching a show on my tablet, making lesson plans on my laptop, and playing a game on my phone. At the same time. That’s three screens simultaneously. Big yikes. This year, I will try to remember to leave the headphones at home for evening walks around the park. I will spin a record instead of tapping a podcast, and I’ll play the piano instead of flipping on the television. I will read books made of paper instead of scrolling through Reels. I will write in a physical journal instead of making a social media post. Not every time, let’s be reasonable, but some of the time. More of the time than I do now. And who knows? If I get bored, I might even write a song.