Teaching is Funny Stuff: Humor in the Classroom

We know having fun in the classroom is beneficial but we have not always been able to eloquently state why. Humor is good for the brain. This doesn’t come as a huge surprise because we are old hat with the physical benefits of endorphins but how it really works in education is coming to the forefront. David Sousa discusses the physical reaction to humor. In education we strive for retention and real learning. This goal is so valuable that we try many different methods to get there. Sousa explains that remembering and retaining facts is so important. One key to remembering in detail is emotion spikes. These emotional spikes in the brain cause direct links to the memories, the content, learned. These spikes can either be positive or negative. These spikes, if harnessed, would create a solid memory. With retention being our main goal, Sousa has suggested that these emotional spikes can be caused by humor in the classroom.
Using humor in the classroom is very fun but some teachers may find this to be a struggle.

There are a few things we need to keep in mind:

· One is to keep it down about the sarcasm – really. Students often cannot tell when a teacher is joking when they used sarcasm and can be offended.


· The teachers actually doesn’t need to funny - only the material does. Even silly jokes which even cause a groan do prove to keep student’s attention.


· Self deprecating humor is best for high school and junior high students. One reason is that most adolescents feel they are the only ones who ever do anything dumb and telling them about the time when you fell down the stairs in front of somebody you were trying to impress can really make them engage with you.


My favorite use of humor in my classroom is definitely self deprecating. My students started to feel a lot more comfortable and engaged in class when I started to do silly things in class. I would tell them stories about walking into walls or doing funny things accidentally. This approach to my students goes hand in hand with my Funny Box. My Funny Box is a simple black index card box in which I keep track of funny/silly things my students and I do during the year – Freudian slips or silly comments mostly. The last day of school I read my comments to the students. They loved them and then had their opportunity to write their won. Reading these comments was fun but also was awesome to hear them say things like “One day we were doing this lesson about verbs and Mrs. Drellack was jumping around demonstrating and fell over in the commons.” Reading the ones which aligned with the class content were most fun. Also, I tried to implement crazy activities and movements with the main concepts in the classroom. On assessments I would ask them about the activities and students would often link the memories to the concept pretty easily.

A Funny Box is something all teachers should have to record these great memories when teaching!