How much do you 'LOL' in your classroom ?

Who doesn't like to laugh ? We all love laugh and in fact 'humor' is perhaps its only kind of genre that captures all types of audience irrespective of age or gender, be it a comedy club or a movie theater. But does humor have a place in classroom? Of course, it has.

It turns out that teachers who are more jovial and promote laughter in a classroom produce better results in terms of students performance compared to a teacher who has a monotonous look and approach towards teaching. And you don't need any big agency to do a survey on this. We all must be remembering, 'that' teacher who was so open and cool that would defy all classroom rules yet, made sure that we learnt and mastered the subject. In fact, my favorite subject - Physics turned out to be favorite, because of my teacher who introduced me to the subject in my high school. and so it goes, that many a times, a subject becomes boring and dull, perhaps due to many contributing factors such as lack of interest, inability to grasp concept, weak foundation of knowledge, poor retention skills etc; So, how many of you have had this experience when a particular subject say, Maths, Chemistry or Biology became interesting not because it you innately fell in love with the subject, but because the person who taught you, left a stunning impression of you ? (leave behind your response in comments below)

Well, it turns out that laugher helps students to de-stress, reduce anxiety and is a great management technique if used well. Here are few ways by which teachers can actually leverage that stunning influence on their students :

1. Celebrate a 'LOL' or 'ROFL' Day : For junior classes, teachers can dedicate once a week sometime, where students can be encouraged to come up and share creative, healthy jokes. The Reward ?- Of course a thundering LOL !
2. It's okay to make mistake but not repeat it: I still remember when I was in my school, one of my teachers would pretend to shoot a chalk on any student who would cause any distraction. But, the teacher never really used to shoot on any student, rather used to intentionally aim it on the wall and would say "The wall is making too much noise today, here's some CaCo3" and all would laugh.
3. Shooting humorous questions: What is the name of the american idol, that likes to drink a lot of tea? (a possible response- Statue of Liber-tea) Using questions with creative answers, often helps students to think outside the box and this is a critical skill that needs to be developed.
4. Use puns as an effective method to create jokes: For example a Math teacher could ask "Why was six scared of seven?"---: Because seven "ate" nine. (6,7,8,9)
5. Keep changing the tone of teaching during a session: Research by Middendorf and Kalish (1996) indicates that after 15 minutes of direct instruction, the average student loses focus. The student's brain needs a "tone change" time. Humor can come as a rescue here. Many a times, one of my professors who taught us taxation at our business school would keep one slide of humor/cartoon strip related to the topic, after every 15 slides just to lighten up the mood. And guess what, we all used to wait for 'that' LOL moment.

If boredom is a 'antagonist', then humor is definitely a 'protagonist'. Always comes to the rescue if used well. You can add more such interesting elements of surprise to your teaching. Besides, classroom is not for information dissemination, google does that anyways. Classroom has to be a place of discussion, debate, exchange of thoughts and more importantly a place to grow and nurture ourselves every single day, along with the students.