Humour is an important tool for a teacher. It is – naturally – entertaining, but it also helps to hold attention and make things stick. For instance, I still associate Newton’s second law with Ad Nijenhuis and his story about punching Sophie on the nose on an ice rink. Humour can also be enormously helpful in defusing the tension of certain situations. Responding to a disruption or an insult with a joke has a very different effect from getting angry; sometimes one is called for, sometimes the other.
Because humour is so useful, most teachers develop an arsenal of stock jokes over time. After all, you have different classes every year, and repetition makes humour stronger. A personal favourite of mine is the ‘it’s called that because’ routine, in which I explain very obvious biological names. ‘This frog is called the blue poison dart frog because it’s blue.’ ‘The metacarpal bone is called that because it’s a bone in the middle of your hand.’ When pupils start rolling their eyes the moment I say ‘it’s called that because’, I’ve got them exactly where I want them.
Another favourite is to intercept a note being passed around, read it in silence, and then loudly lament that it contains no declarations of love. That usually produces a bit of sniggering and my goal is achieved: they stop passing notes.
Pupils learn not only from what you say, however, but also from what you do. Humour breeds humour – a side effect I consider highly desirable. A first-year class that already had a taste for a good joke was treated to my note-passing gag. A week later they were back in my lesson, and there was a note being passed around with very conspicuous theatricality – it had already done the rounds of half the class before I managed to get hold of it. This is what it said:
And with that, my mission was accomplished.
Reinder Bosman (1997) is a biology and research & design teacher at the Goois Lyceum in Bussum. He shares his experiences in and around his classroom and in the field here.