What to Do When Students Find an Assignment Boring

In Reader’s Workshop in third grade, we have a rule that students have a right to love what they read. During our self-selected reading time, after students give the author a reasonable try (a few pages for a picture book, one chapter for a chapter book, etc.), they are invited to return the book to the library if they are not enthralled. Of course, in our balanced literacy block, students aren’t always able to reject the texts, but in a world of such incredible richness and endless choices of great literature, independent readers absolutely have this right. We do this to foment the passion of lifelong readers, to aid in the shaping of young readers’ preferences, and to make space for joy in the reading block.

I extend that philosophy and practice into a standing invitation for kids to change out a boring assignment. Students have the right to feel impassioned by their learning experience, so when they don’t, they can propose an alternative way of working with the material that will better spark their interest while still accomplishing our objective. This often happens if it’s not a preferred modality or when the subject matter is boring for them.

I’ve had students make poems of possessive nouns instead of completing the lackluster worksheet, and others write their own Pokémon multiplication word problems instead of the ones from the book. I even had a bilingual student translate her spelling words into Spanish and color-code all the letters in common between the two spellings, rather than do the “boring” exercise in the workbook.

I’m transparent about the objective, so the students have to propose something that clearly meets it, but I want them to feel safe telling me if they’re bored. I love that this puts the onus on them to address that boredom, so it’s not that I have to do backflips to make everything interesting, it’s that they are invited to take part in shaping their learning experience to be more personally meaningful.

Teaching Students How to Recognize Deep Engagement

I teach this behavior after we have had our beginning-of-the-year norm-setting conversation about each student having strengths and opportunities for growth in different areas. We talk about how someone’s “reading brain” might be extra-strong in picking up on character traits but their “math brain” tends to forget math facts sometimes, or their “social studies” brain is curious about other cultures but not really about history.

Making space for these diverse strengths and sticking points helps to cultivate a scholarly and accepting classroom environment; my students are aware that every member of our classroom community has a fantastic constellation of strengths and interests and that my job as their teacher is to help them run with their interest and support them through what’s tricky.

Springing from this conversation, I ask students how it feels when they get to learn about something they really love. We do a turn-and-talk, and I have them share out some emotion-focused words that demonstrate how it feels to be deeply engaged. We also talk about how much better we remember things that we care about; students often bring up a learning memory that happened quite a while ago, and we talk about how new learning can stick with us better if we feel really invested in it. Then, I flip the prompt and ask them how it feels to be really bored in school. I start by sharing a memory of my own to make it feel safer for them to complain productively. 

After a few students share, I tell them that I have some bad news and some good news: first, that they are going to be bored sometimes. I explain that their life is going to include some waiting in traffic and in long lines, some life-sapping paperwork, etc., and while that doesn’t feel enjoyable, it can actually be good for their brains. We look at a brain scan and read about how boredom actually stimulates creativity and emotional regulation in their brain.

Let Students Be the Arbiter of Their Experience

Then I give them the “good” news—that in our classroom, students have a right to be head-over-heels passionate about what they are learning. Deliberately cultivating that scholarly joy and excitement means that my students are laying their foundation as lifelong learners, building academic skills not because they’re following the directions to do so but because it will empower them to seek knowledge and chase great ideas for the rest of their lives. When I explain to my students that they have an open invitation to rework an assignment in a way that makes it more meaningful or more interesting to them, it gives them the reins of agency and autonomy, steering our classroom away from didactic dynamics and making it a place where each child has access to the joy of learning.

If a student would like to put forward an alternative but can’t think of one, I offer a suggestion based on what I know they like, such as “Hmm, how can we put Minecraft into this?” When I want to encourage them to think of it on their own, “What would you change to make this more interesting?” I don’t do a lot of legwork to push them to take advantage of this offer. If they express that they would like guidance in coming up with an idea, I help, of course, but one of the main benefits in my view is that it rewards their initiative to fix their situation.

Practically, this means that my students need to have access to the tools and materials that can bring their vision to reality. Usually, they can get what they need in the supply areas that are already available to them (paper, colored pencils, etc.). The trickier limitation is usually time. Students have to adhere to the same time limit already allotted to the original assignment (like 15 minutes for grammar, for example). We often circumvent this pinch by having students plan and start at school and complete it at home. I am happy to find a much higher completion rate of home choice work than I do of typical homework, and when the ball does get dropped, we have a constructive conversation about managing their time and designing an activity that is feasible, quite a valuable lesson in itself.

I often get thanked by parents for sending home an assignment that their child felt so captivated by, sometimes hearing comments like “I’ve never seen someone get so into possessive nouns before!” or “That’s great that you let her pick how to show what she knows—she hates worksheets.” By honoring students’ interests, we can empower them to carry that agency, self-direction, and joy far beyond our classroom walls.