Posted by Ivory Vendig

The excitement of the first day of school is over. You already know what teachers you have. You have memorized the head shape of the kid you’ll be sitting behind for the rest of the year, and you’ve worn your first-day-of-school-outfit at least three times already. Bored yet? You may notice that magnetic fields are beginning to form between your classmates’ foreheads and their desks. School is basically a six-hour nap.

A pandemic of apathy like this almost made me write off my junior year Spanish class as a total waste of time. No one seemed to care about learning the language (or even just about the grade), so naturally I didn’t either. You know, it’s a little difficult to get excited about a class when the guy to your right is showering the floor with the crumbs of contraband potato chips, there are a couple of students in the back of the classroom decorated in the cords of various electronic devices, and the teacher is too “nice” to say anything about it.

At times, the teacher would remember some experience he had in Spain or Mexico. He started to talk faster, gesturing almost wildly, and his voice had a tint of color to it. I was intrigued—but then the tone of his lecture went abruptly back to newspaper gray when he saw so many sleepy eyes. It was sad.

At school, from 2:00 to 3:20, I was bored. But I wanted to learn the language! So instead of steeping in boredom, every day before class, my friend and I just started talking to the instructor. She was much more vocal than I, and tossed a ton of questions at him. In this little bit of time, he mostly talked about what he knew from living in Mexico, the culture there, and other interesting fragments of information. I think he was encouraged by our interest (in class, he told his stories all the way to the end for the rest of the year, regardless of any static stares), and we fed off that energy. His stories brought a new life to the monotony of verb conjugation.

Sometimes if you find yourself struggling to stay interested in a subject, communicating with your teacher can really help generate enthusiasm and fight any apathy that might be rubbing off on you. Try to figure out why your teacher would dedicate six hours a day to teaching students this one field of study. If your teacher seems uninterested or discouraged, you can either prod him or her with questions to show your interest, or find someone else that is into the subject. Talk to them about the topic, and make it almost like one of your hobbies. Enthusiasm is contagious, so look at the class through the lens of someone who absolutely loves the topic.

My friend and I still had something else to deal with in our mission to overcome scholastic boredom. We were limited to how much of the language we could actually learn because of our class’s widespread indifference. (Our trip to Spain was even canceled for this reason!) Classes mostly consisted of the instructor finding out that many didn’t do their homework, and class time turned into do-your-homework-from-the-night-before time, while a handful of us sat around with nothing to do.

So we found something to do. In all of the downtime (and there was a lot), we played hangman—en Español. I’m pretty sure we set some kind of record in the “number of consecutive games of hangman played in 80 minutes” category. We probably learned a lot of our vocabulary by accident from those games alone. The teacher even made our “personal study” into a class-wide event from time to time on the whiteboard. It was fun.

To avoid indifference in school, sometimes you have to create your own homework assignments, and not necessarily the written kind. Playing hangman doesn’t really work with trigonometry, nor would most teachers be okay with you drawing pictures and whispering about the alphabet in their classrooms. The point is that sometimes you have to go out of your way to teach yourself things. But it’s not a burden—the ways you come up with to teach yourself are always going to be the most fun because you know exactly how you like to learn.

Learning to teach yourself is a skill in itself. Try making up your own field trips. Organize the information you have to study for each test into a colorful visual aid. Also try renting a historically accurate video that relates to class, arranging to talk to someone employed in the field (an adventure to be taken by all members of the TE Writer’s Club!), or visiting a museum, as Deepika Azariah mentioned in her September 18 post.

The most effective way of enjoying any class, however, is seeing the bigger picture. Right now, the furthest extent I’ve used my limited knowledge of the Spanish language is in reading caution labels on different household items and occasionally eavesdropping on Spanish-speaking strangers in the line at the grocery store. There are obviously tons of other uses for knowledge of a second language (like if I really do go to Spain one day!), but it might be a little more difficult to figure out why you need to care about some of the more obscure classes.

Consider these questions: Will the study be a part of your career in the future? Or if you have trouble thinking that far ahead, will it make for an interesting conversation with a friend or someone you’ll see later on in the week? Aren’t the most intriguing people you know the ones who are interested in a wide range of things?

One constant that you can apply to any class is this: developing a habit of zeal in everything you choose or have to do will round out your education and your personality. Of course, having energy and interest at school might cause some raised eyebrows, since it’s so rare now. People will wonder what makes you so excited about your education and life in general! Take the initiative; dare to like school!