As an advocate, I believe it’s vitally important for us to hear the voices of students who have unique learning abilities. Recently students on my caseload wrote why they have difficulties in school for a writing contest. Black boys do care that school is boring! Our students have voices, we must listen in our work to reform education.
Dear Mr. Allen,
School is boring and teachers just don’t understand!
We are not motivated in school because the work is not interesting to us.
It’s like when you do the same thing every day over and over again. But we don’t even use it!
We don’t want to do the same thing over and over and over again.
But it’s not like we get to tell the teacher.
We need to do something else.
Like, who actually listens to us?!?
It’s not that we don’t want to learn!
We get stuck doing the same schedule of activities.
That gets boring.
A lot of students feel like all teachers do is fuss at us.
Teachers expect us to sit still, be quiet, think when they say think, move when they say move
I mean we are kids!
But we can’t do things kids would like to do.
If I could change one thing about school I’d add games to our work.
I believe more of my peers will do it.
It will be fun for them too.
Adding a game to the homework could make us try to do it, turn it in to get a grade.
I think teachers can make their class fun for anyone.
Teachers could even ask us about things we’d like to learn.
Maybe schools should be planned like sports because both are similar.
Family oriented, engaging and fun.
I believe doing that would make school better for us all.
Jason has worked in education for over 15 years as a teacher, blogger and community advocate. He speaks and writes primarily about the need to improve education for Black boys, particularly increasing the number of Black male educators in schools. In addition to blogging here at EdLanta, Jason is also a featured writer at Education Post.