Humor Styles and their Effects in the Classroom

So you want to be a comic teacher? Did you know that there are actually different types of humor? According to Romero and  Cruthirds ( 2006 ), there are multiple humor styles that can be employed in the classroom and even workplace. Caution: Not all Humor Styles are effective in all situations. Don't worry, I can be your guide and lead you to the best possible humor styles for each of the specific diverse moments that you experience in school as a teacher and as a coworker. Oh don't worry, I am not making this stuff up, I am by no means the expert, I am simply going to translate the research of Romero and Cruthirds into teacherneese. After all they are from the business world, so without a guide as competent as me in both languages, much of the research could be lost in translation.
So what are those Humor Styles? Have no Fear, a Brief List is Right Here!

• Affiliative Humor- This is the joke telling, joking around, positive, good-natured type of humor. This type of humor brings people together. 
• Self-Enhancing Humor- This type of humor is the one displayed by people who are looking to have a more humorous look on life.  People use this type of humor to have a more positive look on life, like a coping mechanism (probably a more healthy approach than alcohol). 
• Aggressive Humor- This is the more negative style of humor. It is used to manipulate others through the threat of ridicule! (If you want to keep your job, it may be a good idea to stay away from this type of humor.)
• Mild Aggressive Humor- This type of humor is aggressive humor watered down (without scotch or any other strong form of mind altering substances).   It's used as a playful way to disagree or convince others to change their behavior. 
• Self-Defeating Humor - This type of humor is used to downgrade yourself. People use this style to bring their own status down, by exposing their faults or at least their faults in a humorous way.

So what does this all mean in the school setting? Well, nothing if you don't choose to use it.  Well the good news is that this information is actually meaningful to a teacher. Let's pick apart some day to day scenarios that you may face as a teacher and how you can turn to humor to.... well to do ..... something.

1. SCENARIO 1- Getting your classroom to feel united can be a daunting task when so many students (30!), from too many different backgrounds, inhabiting a room smaller than their house, that often smells of old socks ( lack of deodorant) and feels like the Sahara desert ( No air- conditioning).  Well HUMOR can help!   Look just there I used affiliative humor to joke about the classroom situation. Every time, I bring up these facts to my students, they always roll around on the floor exhausted from laughter. We have so much fun joking about our horrible classroom conditions, that we feel more connected living in them for 6 hours a day together!
2. SCENARIO 2- Getting through the students' ears and into their brains can be difficult when the students are having to learn boring material in insufferable conditions. Turn to HUMOR, it can be your co- teacher, your attention grabber, your.... mental magnet, so to speak! As I see my students sinking into their chairs becoming melting more and more into their desks, I pull out my mild aggressive humor to help shape their behaviors. I begin to poke a little innocent fun and the way they are melting and falling into their desks. I ask them if I am really so boring that a nap seems more appealing! I tease them innocently about how they are like limp puppets that need to be brought back to life! The kids get a kick out of all of the comparisons and are eager to come back to our classroom discussion or activity more engaged and better behaved. So guys (Greatbatch & Clark, 2002), discovered that humor increases motivation, enhances listening, and understanding of the messages teachers are trying to deliver. 
3. SCENERIO 3- Relating to the students can be so hard in the classroom because you want them to view you (the teacher) as the authority, but at the same time, you want them to know that you like everyone in the world are human. You struggled as a kid (or maybe you still do) with many of the same behaviors/ academics that you are helping them with.  Use self-defeating humor to bring your status down to their level, so that they can connect better to you. I always try to make jokes about my self and my horrible spelling or the number of warning slips I received as a student for my non-stop talking disability (well at least I thought that it was uncontrollable, so therefore must be a disability). The kids get a kick out of my slamming my own weaknesses, and then feel more connected to me. They begin to realize that I am not judging them. I am just like them. 

There are so many benefits of using humor in the classroom and around it. You can take these humor styles and use them to better communicate with your students, relate to their needs, shape their behavior and create more cohesive classrooms. Humor could be your answer to many of life's problems, except  for why fried eggs always stick to stainless steel pans, and why the strawberries always spoil before you can finish them. OK, so maybe HUMOR can be your answer to just some of life's problems.  
  

How Humor Can Work For You at Curriculum Night

         So I have just finished another assigned reading for this grad class on humor and I am attempting to apply what I have read to my ridiculously fun life as an elementary school teacher. Last week, we had our curriculum night. For those of you, followers, who are unfamiliar with what a curriculum night is, let me explain. It is the night that parents come to school to hear a presentation from their child's teacher. For my presentation, I decided to take a humorous approach to an often tension-filled experience of the nervous teacher presenting to a room filled with parents' high expectations for their children.

         The next day, a teacher stopped me in the hallway to let me know that one of my current student's parent had emailed her to tell her what a hoot I was at curriculum night. In addition, several parents emailed me in the days to follow thanking me for a fun and informative presentation. One parent went as far as to say that it was her most entertaining curriculum night ever. All of these compliments made my heart soar, but the real question was why was it entertaining and how did I effectively engage humor to engage my audience?

          According to Lefcourt (2000), there were a multiple aspects of the presentation that when added together created a humorous and memorable night. Let's break the night down and psychoanalyze it!

The followings is a list of variables responsible for humor in any situation. 

1.)The presence of tension and arousal. 

It would be an understatement to say that I was nervous. All teachers are nervous on curriculum night. We are used to presenting to kids, but adults is a completely different story. There is always a sense of tension in the air. Parents are uncomfortable being back in the little desks of an elementary school watching a teacher as well. I had to find a way to cut the tension by arousing the parents. Hopefully the way I structured the presentation would do the trick.

2.) Incongruity in situations

I began by mocking the situation that the parents were in the desks and decided that I would treat them like the actual students. I began my presentation by writing the directions on the board for when they entered the room and explained the classroom expectations using our CHAMPS poster. The same way I would introduce any activity to my fourth grade. I explained to the parents that if they behaved appropriately and followed the expectations, I would give them a PAW and if they did not follow the expectations that they would get a Warning Slip. This was the first step of the arousal and began the expression of laughter among the parents. I really did give out PAWs and Warning Slips as the presentation continued. In the end, I even gave them homework. Part of the fun was that the students knew I was doing all of this, but I told them to keep it a secret. That's how and why so many students convinced their parents to come to curriculum night. 

3.) The comedian's ability to take appropriate risks

Before the parents had entered the room, I prepared a powerpoint presentation outlining my classroom expectations and procedures, created a quiz show to quiz parents on how much they were listening, filled a backpack up with random stuff from around my room and created a sign that stated, "Mrs. Mahmood (May-mood) The Teacher." I hung the sign around my neck and put the back pack on. I wore these two pieces the entire night. It took a lot of GUTS for me to wear the back pack and the sign. It was not common for teachers to take risk to wearing something silly in front of the parents risking their professional persona, but I took the risk because it was worth the reaction from the parents!

4.) The presence of Koestler’s term "Bisociation" or a good punch line!

I speckled a myriad of jokes throughout the presentation to give it a good seasoning. 

-When I was presenting my goals for every student. I told the parents that I was Vanna White on Wheel of Fortune as I touched each box on the smart board to revel my goals.

-When I quizzed the parents, I used funny responses to questions like Homework should never involve a.) reading/writing b.) effort c.) tantrums, mental breakdowns, or hissy fits d.) fun. The parents got a kick out of my quiz questions.  When they were taking the time to enter their responses into the remotes, I hummed the jeopardy tune. 

- I made silly comments like, "This year we changed book reports from every month to every other month. You all can thank me later!"

-At the end of the presentation, I told the parents, " I am sure that you want me to answer the real question on your mind. What is up with that backpack?" Then I explained the educational theory of students coming to school with an invisible knapsack of their background knowledge and then proceeded to pull out objects that represent what their children would be learning in my class, like: posters, simple machines, flash-cards, planet fact cards, a map of the US, a jar of rocks, a light bulb, amongst other things. The parents were laughing too hard and then one parent yelled out. How big is that backpack? Unfortunately, I had to give her a warning slip for not raising her hand to share. 

5.) The presence of Laughter- which sets the mood and allows others to feel comfortable laughing.

When I began my presentation, I was getting into my silly frame of mind. Making voices to imitate the kids and they way they react to all of the classroom procedures and no one was laughing yet. So, finally I had to break the silence and I started laughing at my own jokes. It was amazing how contagious I was. It was like no one was sure that I was being funny until I confirmed that you were aloud to laugh at me, by laughing at myself first. Once a few parents began to laugh, everyone was chuckling louder. The more excited they got, the more excited I got, which caused them to get more excited. Everyone left smiling in the end.

How did I pull it off? I am not sure. People view me as being a fairly confident person, but I have to admit that I am quite vulnerable when it is time to pull out the humor or do anything in front of other adults. I get nervous that the punch line won't come off right or that no one will think that I am saying is amusing. I am fearful for how I will be perceived and I am nervous and embarrassed to do things to make adults or kids smile. However, I take the risk in an attempt to connect better with people; my students, their parents, or my colleagues. I know that humor has a way of connecting people. I hope that I have left a positive impression in the parents' minds and made them feel that their time at curriculum night (after their exhausting work day) was both enjoyable and informative and that they keep wanting to come back to school to get a second dose of humor. 

From Haha! to Aha! First Thoughts

          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!

•       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 I don't remember some of their names to make them laugh. 
•      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.