how often I've heard this excuse for students with poor self-management skills and poor study habits, ADD or not.
Some kids are bored because they've been conditioned by adults in their lives to think they're supposed to be bored.
As a teacher, my response is:
"Your attitude is a choice. "Bored" is an attitude that you can choose and hide behind. Or you can choose to find something of interest in what you are learning, and thus engage your brain. It's up to you, but if you choose to be bored, you have no one to blame but yourself."
I know there are legitimately tedious tasks in any student's day. That's just life. Personally, I find many routine chores around the house to be tedious. That doesn't mean that I don't take out the trash or clean the cat litter because I find it "boring." When something is tedious, I find a way to get it done and move on. I share ways to do those things with my students, as well. Of course, just because I find taking out the trash to be tedious, doesn't mean that many ADD/ADHD people won't grab the trash bags or bins with relief, because it gets them up, out, and moving. "Boring" or "tedious" is subjective.
I currently have a very bright adhd student. I've banned the word "boring" from his vocabulary in my classroom. Why? Because he uses it for every task that he can't finish in under 2 minutes. It's "boring" to him when a task requires multiple steps and an extended focus to complete. He prefers math; even with a page of complex problems, each problem only takes a couple of minutes, giving him the relief of closure as he finishes each one.
Writing, though...requires thinking, organizing those thoughts, drafting, proof-reading, editing, re-writing...it's "boring," not because his skills are low, or he has nothing to say, but because it's really hard work for him to stick to longer tasks. He communicates quite openly about it. If he has to focus his thinking, he doesn't like it, so it's "boring." If nothing else, he's expanding his vocabulary, lol. Since he can't use the word "boring" to complain, he's finding a rapidly expanding list of creative synonyms. He's actually spending time LOOKING for, and planning for, ways to say something is "boring" without the "b" word, because that's part of what he does to excuse himself from anything that taxes his attention span. All without realizing how much attention he's paying to finding new ways to say something.
Much of his assigned written work is in content areas. But...when I have to assign a prompt to assess his writing skills, I'm going to set "boring" free and let him write about everything that's boring, and all the ways to complain about it. I'll bet he'll stay focused all the way through the process.
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