Use of humor in the classroom teaching?

Humour can be fun as long as you don’t give a face of sarcasm especially when we brust out amid those inquisitive kids around.  Humour that degrades and intents to hurt students sentiments either by ridiculing their physical aspects or cognitive abilities or even their culture-religion can lead to a growth of inferiority feeling- and just like that we won’t even realize that the child has slowly but surely faded away from us.  As teacher none of us intent to do so but as I said unaware and out of innocence –at times our humour can go all wrong-although our intent was to make the class rigorously animated.  The subtlety and ambiguity always hangs around with any sort humour.  Thus, we need to be awfully careful about it usage.

 Now, the question is-why do we use humour  in classroom setting?  Reasons-Just a speculation-prone to be debatable-likely to be wrong-but speculation as I said!

Some in pursuit of wit and love for humour-and some wanting to be amuse and some out of sheer frustration-and some to electrify their class-consciously or consciously  resorts to  such a cheap and pathetic humor at times that they ultimately end up maligning a certain camp in a huge group.

Seriously-in school setting-anything that stirs up laughter cannot be humor. As a teacher one cannot even accidentally bear a notion that in the school sense-humour should be light hearted and laughable at cost of students’ failure.  

But yes!  Any lighted hearted positive remarks that evoke laughter from the dreamy looking students in late afternoon classes can be categorized as a superb humour.  Today, in modern school setting, we cannot overlook humour-espicially with banning of corporal punishment,  perhaps to some extent, we can resort to healthy humour to pump up our students and in process get our job done.  Interaction-intimacy and more openness can be developed leading to good teacher-student rapport.  Thus leading to healthy class room teaching atmosphere.   Moreover, it can also make a lovely space to dig deep into the lives of the kids beyond their classroom setting and end up  providing comfort and security in their lives. 

When I say humorous-Teacher need not have to act or look comical-perhaps his tone-mood that brings into the class and ultimately his temperament could also play huge role in establishing animated teaching-learning atmosphere.     

Having said that-if we over do it again it has a tendency of diverting learners attention from the lesson and at times kids can take us very lightly (Here, in negative sense)-and you end up in no man’s land.

But I am sure many would agree that the child’s response to a lesson becomes effective with a well calculated humorous approach-and can ultimately make both the parties happy at the end of period.