Elementary School Teaching Portfolio

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The Un-Bored Mind - 2022

Boredom, as described by Michael Pollan, is a defense that "the educated mind deploys against experience so that it can get through the day without being continually, exhaustingly astonished.” (The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World, 2001)  

In response to Michael Pollan, I say that it is in great part the educator’s job to instill the dire need of boredom as an asylum from an entirely astonished life. An astonished life is paved with curiosity, connection, observation, information, creation, and personal experience laced deeply with significant meaning. It requires education - whose ultimate goal is to create minds which flourish to the highest capacity of human life and living, that one might live a good and ethical, satisfactory life.  

“I confess there are some men’s constitutions of body and mind,” Locke writes, “so vigorous and well framed by nature that they need not much assistance from others; but by the strength of their natural genius they are from their cradles carried towards what is excellent, and by the privilege of their happy constitutions are able to do wonders. But examples of this kind are but few; and I think I may say, that of all men we meet with, nine parts of ten are what they are, good or evil, useful or not, by their education. It is that which makes the great difference in mankind.” (Some Thoughts concerning Education, 1693)  

The mind of humankind is not, however, a meager receptacle for assimilating the knowledge of past thinkers, no matter how wealthy a bounty the accumulated knowledge may be. It is also, by nature, an unorthodox vehicle of creation, a prolific machine, fertile with the seeds of synthesis and composition. Humans create. It is the educator’s job to provide serviceable guidance and administer tools worthy of equipping younger generations for the most excellent and highest use of their sterling minds. It is the art educator’s job to teach them to take a discrete measure of that which is received by their minds (through education or experience) and transform it into a thing of substantial meaning.  The art educator teaches its students to utilize the higher thought processes of abstraction, authorization, perception and ambiguity - each of which (and there are many more) are facets of a creating mind.     

Due to the nature of observation, an educated, creative mind becomes more generously responsive to its surroundings - both with nature and with relating to others - and is therefore a greater contributor to society. An educated, creative mind engages with the world through heightened aesthetic sensitivities and deeper qualitative experiences. The artist sees what surrounds them and assigns to it some meaning grander than naturally rationed.  They then, as if by compulsion from deep within their innate, awe-struck, rudimentary seat of creative being, tell about it, infecting others.   

And human astonishment continues to breathe into us its life.