Humor is an essential element of everyday life and helps bring some light-heartedness and fun to otherwise mundane or challenging tasks. When teaching, you don’t need to ram in comedy, separate from the core concepts. The key is to ensure that you prioritize teaching vital concepts efficiently. Fortunately, comedy can be a valuable tool and not just a feature of entertainment.
When you have a hard time engaging your students or teaching an important topic, comedy has a higher potential of being valuable. Moments of humor aren’t just distractions in learning. They can maximize the learning experience. Most students appreciate a teacher or professor with a sense of humor.
Below, you will find other reasons to use humor during your lessons and effective ways to do so, shared by the professional educator and essay writer from the domyessay writing service.
Reasons to Incorporate Humor into Teaching
It Keeps Students Engaged
When your students are laughing, it means that they are also paying attention. Humor keeps students on alert since they anticipate the next funny punch line ensuring that you are all on the same page.
It Helps to Create a Sense of Community
One of the joys of life is having a good laugh alongside your peers. Sharing funny moments and jokes with your students creates good memories that they can always reminisce about later in their lives.
It Makes You Relatable
It is easy to seem like a wise, distant person as an educator, which may make you somewhat unrelatable. By sharing some comic moments with your students, they’ll understand that you have feelings just like them. Relatability makes you trustworthy in their eyes.
If you can laugh at your own mistakes, this is even better because you come across as authentic and humble.
It Helps to Lighten the Mood
When there’s a big test coming up or when students are tackling challenging math problems, they are bound to feel stressed. This is only natural, and the teacher should respect that. When you inject a good laugh into such situations, it helps students maintain their perspective. They can also appreciate that such minor stressors are not uncommon in the grand scheme of things.
4 Ways to Use Humor in the Classroom
1. Have a Joke of the Day
As simple as it may sound, something as easy as having a joke of the day may impact your student’s minds. Starting a lesson with a belly laugh is great to set the class in a positive direction. You can look up relevant and appropriate jokes for your students’ age. For instance, an educational joke that college students find hilarious might be too complex for 5-year-olds to understand.
You could also include your students in the process by asking them to come up with jokes. It is a smart approach to teach them practical research skills if you show them how to cite their source or credit the joke’s author. You can also advise them to use writing guides created by professional paper writers. They can access these guides on essay writing services websites and use the citing tips they find there.
Remember that jokes can go beyond basic Knock! Knock! jokes. Also, consider inserting witty questions into classwork, assessment quizzes, and homework.
Also, you might want to pull it off with a prank like using random numbers to call and be silly with them sometimes. Just take note to be extra cautious since they are also your students.
2. Play Mad Libs
Another way to use humor in teaching is the old-school way of playing Mad Libs. It is a fun way to get that grammar lesson across and simultaneously include reading and writing comprehension. Mad Libs are easy to use, and you can get free and fun Mad Libs printables for your classroom.
Allow your students to exercise creativity and wait for the hilarious stories they come up with. Reading these stories out loud will undoubtedly incite some giggles and usually a full-blown laugh fest.
3. Include Pop Culture in Your Lessons
When you cultivate and build healthy relationships with your students, you can learn what their interests are. Making assignments relevant to these interests will increase your student engagement. You could perhaps start with a “Get to Know Me” card game. Use what you learn from this card game to incorporate the things that your students love into lessons.
This tip will work whether you’re teaching physical or virtual lessons. Whatever pop culture is most relevant to your students’ group, make it relevant to the class. You’ll get a few laughs and giggles once your students realize that you “understand” what they enjoy and like.
4. Use Comic Strips
Add humor to the lesson by using cartoons, doodles, or animation. A comic strip by itself is simply humorous. You can use them when teaching students about sequencing, finance, creative writing, and vocabulary. Displaying the comic strips during the lesson will bring joy and smiles to students’ faces. Comic strips are also a good conversation piece that will encourage academic discussions in the class.
Things to Consider When Using Humor
When using humor during your teaching, there are important things to keep in mind to ensure that it doesn’t have a negative influence or no influence at all:
- Always teach using constructive humor that is not offensive or hurtful.
- Carefully decide on the subject matters where comic relief is appropriate. Usually, sensitive matters such as unexpected deaths or mental conditions are off-limits.
- Be conscious of your tone to ensure that your message is delivered correctly.
Take Away
There are more benefits of using humor in lessons apart from just a good laugh. It promotes communication skills and engages the brain to foster good critical thinking skills. But it is important to use it wisely.
