Facing a classroom filled with tough-talking teenage boys quick to volunteer that they “hated English more than any other subject,” rookie English teacher Ariela Freedman blanched.
Should she follow that old teaching adage “Never smile before Thanksgiving” and attempt to rule by fear at Benito Juarez, a West Side high school with a tough reputation?
“I tried yelling, but it’s just not me, and besides, it kills the classroom environment,” said the petite 22-year-old from Rochester, Minn.
Instead, Freedman discovered she could keep control, and captivate her students’ interest, by making them laugh.
To teach the class of 23 boys and 4 girls how to write a business letter, Freedman recently read sample letters from the humorous book “Drop Me a Line, Sucker: the Prank Letters of James and Stuart Wade,” and then challenged her students to craft their own obnoxious business letters to leading manufacturers “to see if we can get a response.”
As the students started on the letters, Freedman smilingly cautioned them that “the letter has to be PG-rated.”
“This is so cool,” whispered 17-year-old Martin Gallardo.
“Of course, really what I want them to do is learn to write a business letter, but I’m not telling them that,” said Freedman, who waited until the end of class to distribute the grammatical guidelines the students must follow when writing their prank letters. “Making them want to do it is the trick.”
Although a few of Freedman’s colleagues find her comical approach a bit unorthodox, a growing number of education experts are touting humor as a powerful teaching tool.
“A teacher with a sense of humor comes across as non-threatening,” and that’s a good thing, said Robert Sylwester, author of a “Biological Brain in a Cultural Classroom: Applying Biological Research to Classroom Management” (Corwin Press). “The kids will take the position of, ‘If you treat me decently, I’ll treat you decently.'”
The benefits range from reducing misbehavior to enhancing the learning process, but unfortunately classroom humor is not a topic covered in colleges of education, said Cheryl Miller Thurston, co-author of “If They’re Laughing: Ideas for Using Humor Effectively in the Classroom, Even if You’re Not Funny Yourself.”
“It’s the single most effective tool I’ve used in the classroom,” the former elementary school English teacher said. “Humor reduces tension and anxiety. It motivates and energizes students, and it gives them a hook on which to trigger recall.”
There’s a prevalent fear among teachers that allowing laughter means surrendering control of the classroom, but that doesn’t have to be the case, Thurston said.
“You have to be careful because students sometimes look at laughter as a signal to get out hand,” she said. “You just have to teach them as you do with any other thing that you have to get back on task–laugh and then get back on line.”
A judicious amount of laughter makes class infinitely more interesting, said Thurston, adding that creating a humor-filled classroom is even more important today, when teachers are constantly preparing students for another round of standardized tests, such as the Iowa Test of Basic Skills.
“The horrible danger of this increased emphasis on testing is that teachers are losing their sense of humor and kids are losing interest,” Thurston said. “You need to get the kids’ attention.”
It’s also no secret that students are more willing to work with a teacher they like, and humor is one way to create a social bond between pupils and instructors, said James Neuliep, professor of communication at St. Norbert College in De Pere, Wis.
Neuliep is the author of a 1991 study that showed that high school teachers typically use humor as a way of putting students at ease, getting their attention and demonstrating that the teacher is human.
Building a bridge
Humor helps establish social relationships by bridging what he calls the “psychological distance” between teachers and students, Neuliep said.
“Ultimately, I think what humor does is it motivates them to work harder,” said Neuliep, who consciously includes jokes and funny stories in his college courses.
Whether the students actually learn more is difficult to determine, but studies have shown that students at least perceive that they learn more from teachers who are successful at reducing that psychological distance.
Still, research on using humor as a teaching tool is limited, and according to many education experts, inconclusive.
Creating a bond
“People say laughter does everything from improving learning to promoting good health, but we didn’t evolve laughter to improve learning or promote good health,” said Robert Provine, author of “Laughter: A Scientific Investigation,” (Viking Press) and professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of Maryland.
“Laughter evolved in the service of communication, or bonding, with other members of our group, so to turn around and say it’s an effective tool for learning is a bit of a leap.”
It is, however, an effective way to create a playful setting, Provine said.
“People who laugh together are going to bond together, so laughter in the classroom would be a sign that you were establishing a playful social setting, and that could be a good thing,” Provine said.
For instance, students might be more willing to work with a good-humored teacher than one who is a stern taskmaster.
“Reward is a much more effective tool than punishment in classroom situations,” Provine said. “A teacher who is liked can reward the performance of a student by giving them attention.”
But a teacher who frequently resorts to punishment becomes less effective at doling out rewards because he is not liked, Provine said.
“But whether laughter itself is contributing to the learning is a difficult topic,” Provine said. “They may look forward to that class, but whether it would contribute to learning is another issue.”
A powerful tool
There is even a chance that humor could hamper learning, Provine warned, “Laughter is also associated with riotous play, and if you’re simply working to get laughter and play in a classroom, that could lead to disruptive behavior and actually decrease learning,” Provine said. “Laughter is a powerful tool, and you need to think carefully about how you use it.”
Used appropriately, humor can have an invaluable impact on students, some educators maintain.
“I’ve seen teachers effectively use humor with kids who are in trouble and diffuse their anger,” said Mary Kay Morrison, who conducts humor workshops as a consultant with the Kishwuakee Intermediate Delivery System, which provides staff development to 200 schools in northern Illinois. “Humor also facilitates learning–you’re more likely to remember something if there’s a strong emotion attached to it, for instance, if it was really funny.”
Unfortunately, not much funny seems to happen after the earliest grades, Morrison said.
“It’s understood that in kindergarten, kids learn through play, but we lose that joy of learning after the early years, and we force people to learn rather than facilitate the learning process,” Morrison said.
“What we find most times in schools is kids sitting in a classroom, listening to a teacher drone on, and it’s boring and we turn off all kinds of kids.”
But when teachers inject a little humor into the lesson, the opposite effect occurs, Morrison said.
Salvaging students
Freedman found that creating a humorous classroom environment helped her reach students whom other teachers had already given up on.
“Being able to be myself, being silly, has worked to my advantage,” said Freedman, who faces the daunting challenge of teaching high school English at a school where most students are reading far below grade level. “It really is a challenge to engage them, but it’s a fun challenge.”
The kids find her hilarious, but the funny thing is, Freedman doesn’t consider herself a comedian.
“They’re the ones who are funny,” Freedman said.
A common misconception among teachers is that they have to be funny to use humor in the classroom, Thurston said.
“It’s very important to understand that the teacher doesn’t have to be funny herself,” Thurston said. “It’s about creating an environment that welcomes humor.”
To make class more fun and maintain control at the same time, Thurston encouraged budding comedians, giving the class clowns a few minutes at the end of each class to tell jokes as a reward for behaving themselves during the lesson.
She also gave out other silly rewards, like three raisins or packets of ketchup.
“For instance, I have red hair and the kids used to call me Carrot, very unoriginally,” Thurston said. “One day I came in with a carrot and called it the carrot award and the kids loved it.”
Corny’s still OK
No matter how corny the joke, students appreciate the effort, Naperville North High School science teacher Lee Marek said.
“They may groan,” Marek said. “But they still like it.”
The Fulbright scholar and Golden Apple award-winning teacher recently passed around a can of “pork brains with milk gravy” to provide some comic relief to students struggling to solve a particularly difficult chemistry equation.
To the student who successfully completed the equation, he awarded “Hawaiian Songs of the 1950s,” a record featuring Don Ho on the album cover.
“This is some pretty dense stuff, and you have to try to make it palatable,” said Marek, whose regular appearances performing wacky science projects on David Letterman’s television show have made him something of a celebrity at the school.
“He does make weird jokes,” said Sharon Zhu, 16, rolling her eyes. “Chemistry isn’t that fun, but he makes it fun.”
He fills his speech with bad puns, wears puzzling T-shirts and performs explosive experiments while wearing rainbow safety goggles–all in the name of grabbing the kids’ attention.
Catch the pun
“You have to compete with MTV, with 50-second commercials and with the attention span of a gnat, which some of these kids have,” Marek said.
Advanced chemistry may be dry, but his students listen to him to catch the puns, focus on him to figure out the riddle posed on his T-shirt and brace excitedly for the next explosion.
“Can we blow up stuff today, Mr. Marek?” was the first question a student posed during a recent class.
“We blew up methane bubbles the other day,” the student explained to a visitor. “We didn’t mean to set the ceiling on fire.”
Still, explosions aside, there is a fine line teachers should be careful not to cross when it comes to humor, said Marek, a 32-year veteran who has compiled a manual titled “Humor in Chemistry” and is a cast member of “Weird Science,” a traveling science show that consists, in part, of him blowing things up.
“You don’t want to be Bozo in the classroom,” he said, just minutes before donning his rainbow goggles and lighting a student’s $20 bill on fire, all in the name of science.
