When I became a teacher, I knew that it was going to be an entertaining profession, but what I didn't realize at the time was that much of the entertainment wouldn't come from cool lessons, but would come from the stories of my students' awkward and just plain weird behaviors. Be honest, there is humor in students who share a little too much information about their parents, get school supplies stuck in body crevices, write inappropriate (but humorous things) on the school walls and say the darnedest things. We have all sat around the dinner table and got a good laugh sharing stories about our students' behaviors with our families. But, what happens when it is the teacher who is bringing the most humorous moments to the classroom? I guess what happens is that now it's your students who are sitting at the dinner table sharing with their families the silliest things you have done in class and laughing about their awkward and just plain weird teacher. (Hopefully they are not sharing moments that you got school supplies stuck in your body crevices!)
According to much research (too much to name at this moment), humor serves multiple purposes and shockingly only one of them is entertainment. In the Handbook of Humor Research, Goodman (1983) describes the many benefits of humor, from physical to spiritual and he certainly doesn't side step sharing research on how humor increases memory and motivation of students. So, I guess all the more reason to make our classrooms a little more fun. We must purposely find ways to integrate humor into our classrooms. So, go ahead, dive in full swing the way us teachers do with anything that is researched based. Goodman presents 5 guidelines to being purposefully humorous. I will share them with you below.
1.) The Eye of the Be(hoho)holder – Changing the way you see things will help you see humor in situations. Look at the statement -- opportunityisnowhere. What do you see? Is opportunity no where? Or is opportunity now here? The opportunity is here for you to take the stresses of your job and turn them around into the but of your joke! Take for example that teachers never get to go to the bathroom when they have to go. ( I know it stresses me out too!) Let's turn that into an opportunity to laugh. "A teacher is someone who can drink three cups of coffee before 8am and hold 'em in until 3pm."
2.) Discover the ELF in YoursELF – Look to yourself and your situations to find humor and let the elf out to play. Teachers need to take themselves less seriously and play with situations instead of getting stuck in them. When students are having a hard time with solving a problem, I turn into a baby teacher. I use a baby voice and I tell them that "I don't undewstand how to solve the pwoblem and I need the big fouwth gwaders to help me!" Make sure to turn all your R's into W's. Then I ask them to give me the step by step in order to solve the problem. I make sure to ask a lot of, whining drawn out "but, whhhhyyy?" I also make a few silly mistakes that I know the students will make when they are solving the problem. You should see the motivation in those students to "cowwect the baby teachew". I even call on the students to help me using my baby voice to say each of their names. The students go crazy with laughter and reinforce the steps in solving the problem and I have diffused a stressful lesson of solving a math problem using humor and turned it into a fun learning experience. Baby teacher is a fun-derful way to get the elf- out and have a good time.
3.) Get With It – Use humor for good is the only way to effectively use humor at school. Laugh with students not at students. Humor is laugher made from pain, not pain made from laughter. Make sure to put yourself at the but of the joke or human nature, not single or groups of people who would take offense. Admit it a well thought out joke uses wit and does not revert to blatant rudeness.
4.) Follow the Rule of the 5 Ps- Practice,Practice,Practice, Practice, Practice.
Here are some strategies to get the joke fluency. Yes, us teachers love strategies, especially ones to build fluency!
According to much research (too much to name at this moment), humor serves multiple purposes and shockingly only one of them is entertainment. In the Handbook of Humor Research, Goodman (1983) describes the many benefits of humor, from physical to spiritual and he certainly doesn't side step sharing research on how humor increases memory and motivation of students. So, I guess all the more reason to make our classrooms a little more fun. We must purposely find ways to integrate humor into our classrooms. So, go ahead, dive in full swing the way us teachers do with anything that is researched based. Goodman presents 5 guidelines to being purposefully humorous. I will share them with you below.
1.) The Eye of the Be(hoho)holder – Changing the way you see things will help you see humor in situations. Look at the statement -- opportunityisnowhere. What do you see? Is opportunity no where? Or is opportunity now here? The opportunity is here for you to take the stresses of your job and turn them around into the but of your joke! Take for example that teachers never get to go to the bathroom when they have to go. ( I know it stresses me out too!) Let's turn that into an opportunity to laugh. "A teacher is someone who can drink three cups of coffee before 8am and hold 'em in until 3pm."
2.) Discover the ELF in YoursELF – Look to yourself and your situations to find humor and let the elf out to play. Teachers need to take themselves less seriously and play with situations instead of getting stuck in them. When students are having a hard time with solving a problem, I turn into a baby teacher. I use a baby voice and I tell them that "I don't undewstand how to solve the pwoblem and I need the big fouwth gwaders to help me!" Make sure to turn all your R's into W's. Then I ask them to give me the step by step in order to solve the problem. I make sure to ask a lot of, whining drawn out "but, whhhhyyy?" I also make a few silly mistakes that I know the students will make when they are solving the problem. You should see the motivation in those students to "cowwect the baby teachew". I even call on the students to help me using my baby voice to say each of their names. The students go crazy with laughter and reinforce the steps in solving the problem and I have diffused a stressful lesson of solving a math problem using humor and turned it into a fun learning experience. Baby teacher is a fun-derful way to get the elf- out and have a good time.
3.) Get With It – Use humor for good is the only way to effectively use humor at school. Laugh with students not at students. Humor is laugher made from pain, not pain made from laughter. Make sure to put yourself at the but of the joke or human nature, not single or groups of people who would take offense. Admit it a well thought out joke uses wit and does not revert to blatant rudeness.
4.) Follow the Rule of the 5 Ps- Practice,Practice,Practice, Practice, Practice.
Here are some strategies to get the joke fluency. Yes, us teachers love strategies, especially ones to build fluency!
- Exaggeration- Stretch the problem out once a day, and it will soon go away. The bigger we make the problem seem, the smaller it actually seems. When I got my math class, I was overwhelmed with having to learn the names of 30 more students, so I jokingly assured them that "I will learn everyone's name by the time they graduate from our school, I promise!" In fact, I got everyone's name down after a week. But the kids got a kick out of my saying their names. They would say, "Hey she figured out my name!" Now, I have to pretend that
- Mirror Reality- Make fun of the problems that everyone faces. Turn them into jokes. So, I teach an advanced math class at my school and one thing that I noticed is that many students still don't have their multiplication facts memorized. Knowing that they would struggle throughout the entire year not knowing them since almost all the topics we were covering needed multiplication as a step, I made a plea for them to just learn the facts as quickly as possible. Of course, they all just stared back at me. So, I gave them a fun analogy to drive home what I was talking about. I told them there are two ways to potty train a child. One is to practice going on the potty every day and hopefully after a few months of this, the child will learn how to use the toilet on their own. That's they way they have been learning their facts, practicing a few at a time and hoping that eventually they will know them all. The other way to potty train a child is just to take a weekend, put the kid in underpants and force them to go to the bathroom every half hour until they get tit down by Sunday and never let them revert back to diapers. That's the way I needed them to learn their facts this weekend. Just do it. Of course, the kids started laughing uncontrollably at the allusion to potty training, but I think I drove the point home in a funerous way!
- Reversals- In teaching we explicitly show students what the expected behaviors are, but it's more fun to show them what the expected behaviors aren't. For some good laughs, I like to pretend what a person looks like if they are not paying attention in class. I slump over, put my head down, put a stupid look on my face, play with my ruler, pretend to pick my nose. The kids can barely contain themselves. Or I show them how I don't want them to present their book speeches, as I wobble and wiggle, say um a thousand times, stare at my notecards 3 inches from my face and talk in a monotone voice. Trust me, reversals not only get a good giggle out of the students, but they also leave a lasting impression on what to avoid.
- Getting Creative- Sometimes there is no clear strategy that can be used and you just have to get creative and let your monkey brains do the work. Whether you throw in a joke or give the students a silly response, make sure that you tickle their funny bone in a way that gets them excited about school and gets you excited about your job (yes, you are allowed!). The next time that student comes up to you with a broken pencil tip and asks you what they should do. Pause for a moment, think up a good response and then give them some fun choices like A.) You can put it in your nose, B.) You can try to write with the eraser, or C.) You can sharpen it. Both you and your student will get a kick out of him learning some common sense.
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