People ask me all the time why I choose to write bizarre fiction and poetry, and an answer I find myself routinely giving is that I'm deathly afraid of being boring and while horror fiction is a lot of things, good and bad, it's rarely boring.

This fear of boredom also motivates my teaching style, which I'd like to believe is very active and energetic. I work hard to generate student interest in my class material and the more "boring" the material, the more "exciting" I try to make it through humor, group activities, live readings, and animated lectures. I always juggle approaches, one day putting the class in a circle to discuss, while maybe doing a straightforward lecture the next, and maybe holding class outside the day after that. Sometimes I feel like I'm a motivational speaker for critical thinking more than a teacher in the traditional sense of the word. Heck, I even sometimes try to get students to openly discuss what that word, "boring," really means (especially if I ever hear a student say that a reading or film I assigned "bored" them...). Sometimes my classes can get into controversial territories and students might not like what they hear, but they still can count on the fact that I won't stand in front of the class and just lecture as if talking to a brick wall.

In my web research on this topic, I discovered a great article called "Confessions of a Bore" (*pdf format) -- an article submitted anonymously by a professor to the Winter 2003 issue of Speaking of Teaching, (a newsletter put out by Stanford U's Center for Teaching and Learning). This article illustrated in many ways the reasons why I am afraid of being a bore -- primarily, because it is the "moral responsibility" of the teacher not to waste another human being's time:

A moral responsibility? Committing dullness is a
serious act, I thought then and still think, because you
cause the listener to wish part of his or her life away, to
be drawn toward an attenuated, granular form of suicide.
Bores are torturers. The bore—or to specify further: the
deadly bore—does something so dreadful to time that it
would have been more merciful simply to kill it. The
more vividly one holds in mind the preciousness and
finitude of lived time, the less one can condone boring
anyone for any reason.

"Confessions of a Bore" is a wonderful reminder that teaching is -- and must be -- performative, active, and audience-conscious. Ultimately, being performative doesn't just entertain students -- it models what it means to be excited about knowledge, research, and practice.

This article appears in a special issue, "Why Teachers Have Bad Classes." Related theme issues from Stanford's CTL program include "Active Learning" and "Capturing and Directing the Motivation to Learn"

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