Humor

"A good teacher has to have a sense of humor." This statement is often made in writings on classroom management. There are good reasons for this statement:

By injecting humor, you can help prevent yourself from becoming irritated.

By injecting humor, you can show the misbehaving students that they do not have power over your emotions.

Humor helps sustain students' attention.

But there's just one problem: the importance of humor is usually given only a single sentence. There is a need for further discussion on the subject. To help meet this need, I have made a list of ways that humor could be incorporated into classroom discipline:

Pretend to believe a student who is obviously lying.

You reprimand Eric for talking. Eric says, "That wasn't me, that was Nathan."

You know that's not true, because you were looking straight at him and besides, you can recognize Eric's voice. So you say, "Why Nathan! What a splendid job of ventriloquism! You ought to be in the talent show!"

Hold mock battles.

This idea came to me by accident. I was ready to start a lesson with the whole class, but most of the students were out of their seats. I said, "I still see five students who are out of their seats. Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang!"

Every time the situation reoccurred, the students commented on whether or not I "got to shoot anybody." If I didn't, then I lost the battle.

If the students want to think that they are pulling something over on me by behaving acceptably, that's fine with me.

Pretend to reprimand the well-behaving students.

If you believe in positive reinforcement, you might like this idea.

You could pretend that the well-behaving are the worst-behaving students. While Stephanie is sitting quietly at her desk, you could say, "Stephanie, I'm just gonna have to call your parents! You've been throwing paper wads, you've been running around the room, you've been hollering at other people clear across the room, we're gonna have to do something real quick!"

You could also complain about breathing loudly, palpitating loudly, or some other picayune matter. "I don't know what I'm going to do about Andrew, he's being a real stinker today. He's been scratching that pencil on the paper so loudly I can't hear myself think. And that Laura, wearing that bright yellow dress that hurts my eyes!"

Pretend to reverse a command which had already been made.

Matthew and Aaron are kicking each other. So you say, "Is that what I told the class to do, kick each other?"

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