We were talking about the word literal—how it means a word’s most basic sense without metaphor, but in conversation we frequently use it as an intensifier: “I literally died when that embarrassing thing happened.” (Really? Who brought you back to life?) “I literally lost my mind.” (Really? Have you found it since, or are you still looking?) It followed us into the next day’s vocabulary with annihilate: destroy completely, reduce to nothing. As in the sentence in book Night that we are reading: “Hitler has made it clear he will annihilate all Jews.” Or as in what you might say before a game: “We are going to literally annihilate the other team.” On the other hand, maybe not. The comment about laughter in English class also became my segue into the rest of the class, discussing the Holocaust memoir Night: “And laughter is a good thing to balance out the tragedy of where we’re going next…”
Other opportunities we’ve had for laughter this week:
- Sharing my story of struggling with how hard to try to fit into Japanese society when, as foreigners, we’re never going to totally blend in: Playing on a local women’s club volleyball team, buying Japanese athletic gear, while realizing that sock style was not going to entirely distract from the fact that I stood head and shoulders above many of my teammates.
- Illustrating the vocabulary word apathy with a joke: Person A says, “In your opinion, is the biggest problem among young people today ignorance or apathy?” Person B replies, “I don’t know and I don’t care.”
- Whenever a class is editing writing, I wear my t-shirt that says: “Let’s eat Grandma. Let’s eat, Grandma. Commas save lives.”
- In my Shakespeare unit I particularly focus on word play, sharing one current example at the beginning of every period. Because if you don’t get them in modern English, there’s no hope of getting them in Elizabethan poetry.
- Vocabulary bloopers, oddities, and misunderstandings: English is a wild and crazy language. I love its history, its uses, and its misuses. There is so much potential here. I love, for example, reading through the essay “How I Met My Wife” with advanced juniors, and seeing how many of the oddities they catch—words or phrases we use in English, but never without the negating prefix that the author drops here.
Like I said, no one would say a main quality of either my personality or instructional style is humor. But, as Marzano notes, “If the teacher demonstrates intensity and enthusiasm about the content, students are more likely to perceive the content as intriguing and interesting” (69-70). And humor is one way of demonstrating intensity and enthusiasm. (Plus, it's fun!)
- Knowing that humor actually is a valid instructional tool—it’s more than okay to tell jokes and funny stories and have fun together, as long as the time it takes is proportional to the instructional value reaped.
- Cultivating my own sense of humor: being on the lookout for what tickles my funny bone within my subject area. This is a virtuous circle because the more I share humor, the more people share back to me.
- Curating discoveries. One great thing about piling up birthdays is that with 30 years of teaching experience, I’ve come across a lot of puns, student bloopers, funny stories, cute quotes. But I also have to write it down, file it, Pin it, blog it, do something so I can find it when I need it. It’s so frustrating to come across that comic, pun, or funny story that I was looking for the week after I needed it.
- Losing my self-consciousness. Another great thing about piling up birthdays is realizing what a waste of energy it is to care whether students share my sense of humor. And what I find is that if they can see how much fun I’m having, they’ll probably want in on it.
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