Why School Can Actually Be Fun—And What That Looks Like in Real Life
Last Tuesday, I was standing at the whiteboard explaining how to find the area of a compound shape. Most of my sixth graders were following along, but a boy in the back—Marcus—had his head down on his desk. Not sleeping. Just done.
I could have pushed through. We had a lot to cover. Instead, I said, “Okay, new rule. For this worksheet, you can only use one formula. Any formula. But you have to make it work for every shape.”
The class went quiet. Then someone said, “That’s impossible.”
Another kid said, “No, it’s not. You just have to break the shape into rectangles.”
A girl on the other side said, “But what about the circle? You can’t do a circle with the rectangle formula.”
And then, for the next fifteen minutes, they argued. They drew on their desks. They flipped back through their notes. Marcus lifted his head, looked at the problem, and said, “Wait. Could you use the formula for a trapezoid? If you pretend the whole thing is a trapezoid?”
It was a terrible idea. It was also a great idea. And he was smiling.
That’s when I remembered what school can feel like when it’s not a checklist.
I hear the phrase “school should be fun” a lot, usually from people who don’t spend all day with thirty kids and a pacing guide. They imagine fun as games, apps, celebrations, maybe a class pet. But that’s not what kids mean when they say something was fun. They don’t mean there was a prize. They mean they got to think. They mean they were trusted to figure something out. They mean time moved faster than it usually does.
The good news is, that kind of fun doesn’t require a lot of prep. It just requires a small change in how we hand over control.
I’ve started making tiny adjustments to my lessons. Instead of saying, “Do all twelve problems,” I say, “Choose any five. But at least two of them should be ones you’re not sure about.” Instead of saying, “Work quietly by yourself,” I say, “You can work alone, or you can work with one person.” Instead of saying, “We’re going to practice grammar for twenty minutes,” I say, “Find the three sentences that are written wrong and fix them. Then write one of your own.”
None of these are elaborate. They take no extra materials. But they change the energy in the room. Because the kids aren’t just following directions. They’re making decisions.
Now, I want to be honest about something. For some kids, choice is stressful. I have students who want to know exactly what to do, in what order, and what grade it’s worth. When I said “choose any five,” one girl raised her hand and asked, “But what if I pick the wrong five?”
That’s a fair question. So I answered it. “If you pick problems that are too easy, you’ll be done in two minutes and then you have to find a challenge. If you pick ones that are too hard, you’ll get frustrated and then we’ll work through it together. Either way, you’ll learn something.”
She thought about it. Then she picked the hard ones. She got three wrong. But she also stayed late to ask if there was a pattern in the answer key. That’s not a kid who hates math.
At home, the same idea works, but it can look different. My own daughter is in second grade. She loves science and hates reading logs. A few weeks ago, she came home from school with a worksheet that asked her to summarize a chapter. She was supposed to write one sentence. She sat at the kitchen table with the book open and tears in her eyes.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“I don’t know what to write,” she said.
I looked at the book. It was about a boy named Owen and his brother. I didn’t know the plot. I still don’t. But I knew that if I said, “Just write what happened,” we’d be stuck there for an hour. So I said, “Okay, don’t summarize. Write about the part that made you mad.”
She looked at me like I was breaking the rules. Then she wrote, “Owen was being a jerk to his brother for no reason.”
Is that a good summary? No. Is it a thoughtful reading response? Maybe not. But she wrote it without tears. And the next night, she read another chapter on her own.
I’m not saying every kid needs to write about unfairness to find reading fun. But I do think we underestimate how much kids shut down when they feel like there’s only one right way to do something. When we let them complain about a character, or point out a plot hole, or draw a scene instead of writing a paragraph, we’re not lowering the bar. We’re reminding them that their thinking matters.
A lot of what makes school feel boring isn’t the content. It’s the lack of room to react to it. If you’ve ever sat through a meeting that could have been an email, you know what I mean. Kids feel that way too. They just can’t check their phones.
So what actually helps?
For teachers: Look for the smallest possible place where you can hand over a decision. It doesn’t have to be a big project. It can be, “Pick the order you want to do these three tasks,” or, “You can use a calculator for the first five problems, but not the last three.” The goal isn’t to make everything easy. It’s to make the work feel like it belongs to them.
For parents: Change what you ask at the dinner table. “What did you do in school today?” is a dead end. “What was the weirdest thing someone said?” works better. So does, “What did you do that made you lose track of time?” and, “What was the most annoying thing your teacher made you do today?” That last one sounds negative, but it almost always leads to a real answer. And from there, you can ask, “Okay, what would have made it less annoying?” That conversation can be more useful than any homework folder.
I also think we need to be honest about the word “fun.” Sometimes when a kid says school is boring, they mean it’s too hard. They feel lost, and the class is moving on without them. That kind of boredom isn’t cured by games. It’s cured by support.
Other times, “boring” means too easy. The kid already knows what’s happening and is just waiting for the lesson to be over. For those kids, fun looks like being asked to go deeper—prove why the answer works, or find a different way to solve it, or explain it to someone else.
And sometimes, “boring” really means “I’m tired and I don’t feel good and I don’t want to be here.” No strategy fixes that. Those days are just about getting through.
I’m not trying to say every lesson should be a celebration. I’ve been in classrooms where every activity was a game and kids still checked out. You can’t gamify your way into deep learning. But I do think we’ve created a false split between learning and enjoyment. We treat “fun” like a reward for finishing the real work. But some of the best learning happens when a kid forgets to ask whether something is fun because they’re too busy trying to figure it out.
Yesterday, Marcus came up to me after class. He didn’t say, “That math was so much fun.” He said, “Can we do that thing again tomorrow?”
“What thing?” I asked.
“Where you don’t tell us how to do it.”
I told him maybe. He shrugged and said, “It was less boring than usual.”
That’s the phrase I keep coming back to. Less boring than usual. That’s not a standing ovation. It’s not a viral moment. But it’s real. And in a school year full of worksheets and assessments and scripts, “less boring than usual” might be enough to keep a kid leaning in instead of shutting down.
I don’t know if school can ever be fun for everyone. Maybe it doesn’t need to be. But it can be less boring. It can have moments where kids argue about trapezoids and stay late to ask questions. It can feel like someone noticed they were awake.
That’s not a bad place to start.
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