by David Thomas

Do our students want to play? Do they want to have fun in class?

Maybe.

In the movie The Shining, Jack Nicholson plays a writer who hauls his family into the mountains of Colorado to caretake for a massive, seasonal hotel. His ideas is that while trapped in the wintry Rockies, he will finally complete his novel. If you’ve watched the movie or read Stephen King’s book, you know what happens next to Nicolson’s character, Jack Torrence. On his way toward complete madness and attempt to take out his family, writer Jack manages to produce hundreds of pages of his manuscript. When the camera pans to the progress he has made, page after page is filled with the same line:

“All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.”

Not only is this a chilling cinematic reveal, it pretty much lays bare what we deeply feel about play. You’d have to be a madman to think that play is primary.

Sigh.

I think about this when facing a room full of students. I know they want to play. I know they need to have fun. But I also know they grew up in a world that is “working for the weekend”. My students have been steeped in an ironic world where play is the obsession of a possessed caretaker in creepy hotel. Play is just something you might get a little of, after you’ve done your chores, punched out for the day, eaten your vegetables and finished your homework.

Sure, I am exaggerating a bit. Then again, the reality is—you can teach an entire class and not let anyone have fun and keep your job. Even more, you might even win an award for academic rigor for all your humorless instruction. The risk is in playing, not in being overly serious. And the same thing goes for the students. If you want them to take your course seriously, that’s easy. They will at least pretend on paper that they care. College students have learned to be serious. They know education is serious work.  But ask them to play their brain goes on alert: It’s a trap!

All this is to say, do our students want to play? Yes. Do they want to have fun in class? Yes. Do you have to make it safe for them to play? Yes. Do you have show them how fun can stimulate learning? Yes you do. As a professor at play, you have to do more than just offer fun. You just might have to teach them how to have fun at school in the first place.

All work and no play will make Jill a dull girl. So, why not reclaim the fun? You students will thank you.