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Humor, the brain, and the classroom - Christina - 07-09-2006
Laughter causes changes in the autonomic nervous system and alters stress hormone and neurotransmitter levels. For example, watching 60 min. of a video with the comedian "Gallagher" caused reductions in the stress hormone cortisol.
Then, if laughter is good for the brain, perhaps humor is a valid teaching tool. Do you use humor in your classroom? How?
All best wishes,
Christina
P.S. In the spirit of humor: What works even after it's fired?
Answer: A neuron!
Humor, the brain, and the classroom - papertalker - 07-09-2006
In the solar system of the brain, Humor is but one heavenly body among a hanging host of others: Surprise, Spontaneity, Enticement, Attraction, Smiles, Silliness, Safety, Freedom (no censor)., Meaning (got it!), Connectivity. Humor does not automatically turn on like a light in the heavens; it appears naturally, a phase, a moment in the continuum. But without the warmth and pull of the Sun, nothing holds together. In this analogy, the sun is central to a system that is balanced and healthy and brain-propelled. The energy that the sun is radiating forth into space is that of play—the energy generated by young and old alike to bond and drive the desire to learn. Play and the limbic system, not the frontal lobe, is central to holding the system in place.
Meeting planners and public speakers use games or activities to get people involved. But there are levels of engagement, and these recipes are a poor substitute for the real thing.
If you advise teachers to use humor, they are apt to bring in a joke to read or a cartoon to project in the overhead. If all teachers were trained to be stand-up comedians, the classroom might not be the funniest place in the cosmos, but it would sure be a lot more dynamic and unpredictable than it is.
To introduce humor, it must first be elicited or invited. Humor jumps like Jack out of the Box of shared experience. Humor springs from warm, animated conversation and then joking and word-play over the course of a good meal with friends or family (if you’re lucky). If teachers were trained in the art of storytelling, they could become consummate joke-tellers, or, better yet, they would tell jokes with punch lines that knocked and ricocheted into subject matter. In my experience, teachers move quickly into humor through word-play that springs, in turn from hand-play or puppetry
If teachers felt free enough to play, school would be in a completely different system from the one we’re stuck in. There are lots of movies about this sort of thing, but seeing the movie only points us to the zone teachers need to be in to be funny, spontaneous, irrepressible. The music teacher portrayed by Jack Black in School of Rock is a good example. Ron Clark, in the recent movie about his teaching in Harlem, is castigated by his principal who sees Clark willingly making a fool of himself; Clark, who knows his principal is a jerk, demonstrates the art of risk-taking as he joins his students in jumping rope, knowing this play is a rite of passage for kids who need their world acknowledged by an adult.
Clark is a hero, a 'Disney teacher,' but the fact of life is that most teachers act as if they need permission to play and to laugh. Humor will remain repressed and squelched in a culture where teachers put down creative teachers for being creative. The word ‘Humor,’ in these times, may be found imprinted on a placard held up by a faceless driver waiting for his party at the airport, a hackneyed concept in a Saul Steinberg illustration. There is hope. Play has the power to pierce the cloud-cover. Whenever the Sun shines in on the world of education, play radiates through the atmosphere and Humor appears like a flower poking its head through an icescape of stress, conformity, and testing.