My interest in this book is with the problem of boredom, in particular how we are conditioned to both recognize and respond to it. Ultimately, I am interested in what is the optimal way to engage with this unpleasant and ubiquitous mood state. In spite of pedagogical "innovations," boredom is particularly acute in schools. Students overwhelmingly report being bored in school, especially in the higher grades (National Survey, 2019). Given the extent of student boredom and its negative associations, including student misconduct (Lazarides, 2019), poor academic performance (Daniels, 2015), and dropping out of school (Bridgeland, 2010), this problem is particularly vexing for educators. In response, schools often do one or both of the following: first, endorse, perhaps unwittingly, what novelist Walker Percy (1916-1990) describes as a "boredom avoidance scheme," (1985, p. 11) adopting new initiative after new initiative in the hope that boredom can be outrun altogether (Percy, Rush, 2017); or second, they compel students to accept boring situations as an inevitable part of life, suggesting that maturity requires such compliance"--