Under the Raydar — 2/24/11

After watching “Race to Nowhere” — a film in the documentary series put on by the Education Studies Department, (apart from critiquing what invisible layers were missing from the film in terms of race, gender and socioeconomic inequities and the larger, more dominating pressures and problems with the current American education system — but that is what I will do in another column) I was urged to turn off my computer, turn off my phone, throw my books beneath a pile of calendar dates and be bored.

The documentary was about the performance pressures placed on high school, middle and even elementary school students in certain privileged communities across the country. There were clips of a 10-year-old crying over math homework, and telling the camera that he suffers headaches due to stress — spliced immediately before clips of him at a soccer game, tutoring session, piano lesson, etc.

His parents — and his immediate society — had programmed away his childhood.

The documentary revealed 10-year-olds with stress-induced stomachaches, 13-year-olds hospitalized for stress, and hundreds of students robbed of the creativity that comes from a disatisfaction with boredom.

In many ways, and in many generalizations, we are still those students.

“I’m bored. I think I need to join something else.”

“I’m bored. I think I’m going to go on Hulu.”

“I’m bored. I don’t … I don’t know what to do.”

These are conversations and thoughts that are not uncommon on this campus. Like many of the students pictured in the documentary, students at the College suffer stress that causes sickness, eating disorders, problems with relationships, anxiety and depression.

Some of the stress that students at Middlebury feel could come from the external pressures and reward systems that a significant pocket of students were affected by during childhoods that were so programmed and their worth so publically determined by performance that many students do not know how to be bored, creative and reliant on themselves to feel motivation and happiness.

What would we do if academic departments, performance organizations, MCAB and all of the venues in town decided not to put on a single event for two weeks? What if — at the same time — it became impossible to activate any websites or phone apps that were not educational? What would we do?
What would we do if we had nowhere to race to, if we had nothing to fill our time or resumes and we had to decide honestly: what will make me happy?

I am a culprit of racing, I am a culprit of cramming instead of processing, I am a culprit of overcommitting.

But I am not willing to lose my creativity because I am afraid of that dull silence, or those moments between assignments or meetings.

So I am going to try my best to deal with my boredom in a different way.  It seems that racing toward a grade, a masters program, an academic honor — whether propelled by a strong sense of what the finish line is or pushed by an uncertainty that makes us think we need to excel in every way to safety net our futures — is a race to nowhere. It can be empty, it can be trying. Instead of racing, I’d like to just stop and deal with the space on the track, and see what I can discover there instead.