In the signature of my school's email, I include a quote from the Tao Te Ching: "Those who do not laugh, do not learn at all." It comes from Chapter 41, and I'm not certain which translation gave it to me--I haven't read the Tao Te Ching in far too long--so the verbiage may be inaccurate. This is definitely an out-of-context quote, but the sentiment is too important to pass up: Learning happens with laughter.
This has been one of my undergirding philosophies about teaching since I started. And though I do come across as pedantic or drone on in my lectures--which I'm trying to minimize, to a certain extent--I feel that one of the reasons that students have the positive feelings toward me and my class is because of the importance I place on laughter. Notice, I didn't say, "having fun," though that can absolutely be a valuable way of teaching. In fact, I could stand to incorporate more fun into my classroom. However, I don't view the laughter I strive to elicit from the students as "having fun" or even "entertainment": I view it as a fundamental part of my pedagogy. I feel that I mix about one-third content with two-thirds stand-up comedy in most of my classes. However, like the "jokes" said over the pulpit at an LDS meeting, they're really only funny in the context of the moment, the attitudes, and atmosphere of the moment. I can describe what I do or say (as you'll see in a moment), but it's really much funnier when you'rein the class. The ultimate "guess you had to be there" conclusion to each anecdote. For example, this past week, whilst studying Pride and Prejudice, I wanted to discuss marriage. I had the students writing about marriage in their digital journals, trying to prime the pump of their understanding about the topic. As they wrote, I had some instrumental music playing in the background. I, meanwhile, opened a new tab on my computer and loaded up the priest from The Princess Bride and his iconic declaration about "Mawiage". The clip is only about a minute long, but I made certain to play that as the introduction to the conversation, not even bothering to even show the clip--I only put it through the speakers. A good number of the students were mouthing the words, smiling and laughing at the speech. Another thing that I do: When I'm teaching about King Henry VIII and his many wives, I try to draw a parallel of the girls' ages whom he married to the kids' ages. One of Harry's wives was just sixteen when they married, and I pointed out that he had children older than their new mother. "Ladies," I say, "it would be like you were hanging out at your best friend's house, and her dad bops into the room and says, 'Hey, girl, you're lookin' fine!'" I then pin one of the girls who makes the mistake of making eye contact and I pretend to smolder and wiggle my eyebrows. That usually gets a good wave of laughter and/or revulsion. Some of my jokes are so engrained in my lessons that students who've passed through my class can ask older kids about, say, a funny drawing, and all who hear the question say, "Yeah! I remember that! Wubbah twees!" (That last part is just for any alumni who read this and remember something about Imperialism.) I don't know if that demonstrates a lack of creativity on my part or a commitment to consistency, but it is true that these small things get caught in kids' minds and seem to stick for a fair amount of time. This technique, I think, I picked up from having some genuinely funny teachers in my own high school experiences. I remember Mr. Jackson in my Calculus AB class, lecturing about derivatives (or somesuch thing). The red laser pointer wiggled on the whiteboard, and he asked a question from the back of the class. I turned to look at him--eye contact is important--and completely forgot what he'd asked, since he was standing on an empty desk, calmly interrogating the problem on the board. In another class, Mr. Ficklin (spelling may not be accurate) was drawing a pool over which a daredevil was going to jump his motorcycle. This was to describe forward velocity, I think. Someone suggested that there be a shark in the pool. I piped up that there should also be a lion with a snorkel, as that was a gag from a Simpsons episode. Mr. Ficklin laughed, agreed, and drew the lion's tail and mane and, if I remember rightly, the snorkel. These and many other examples all fed into my own perception of how to run a class. I will stand on a desk, and there are plenty of times when I will modify what I'm drawing or discussing by something suggested by a student. This is one of the most fulfilling parts of my job. By using laughter, I can often crack through apathy about a piece of history or literature and leverage that toehold enough to make them curious, interested, or engaged. It is one of my most important tools, and one that I will go to great lengths to utilize. In my Shakespeare class, there will be a single point that I want to make, but I take the time to explain a tangential story that scarcely illustrates it, choosing the anecdote for the simple reason that I find it funny. Whilst teaching about Pride and Prejudice I use Mr. Collins as my easy punching bag, throwing out the recommendation that girls marry a guy like him whenever they give me sass. And that leads me to one of my greatest fears of my career as a teacher: That I will stop being funny. I worry about this almost every time I think about the future. I feel as though my comedy has an expiration date, that I will go into a class at the beginning of one school year and no one will get my jokes, that I'll be greeted with stony silence, half-hearted courtesy chuckles, or sycophantic but confused snickers. Maybe that's how I'll know it's time to retire: When my students are no longer those who laugh, and I'm left alone to my old, tired, unfunny jokes. Cheese Grater
One of the hard lessons of becoming an adult is reconciling the many ways in which I was wrong about what it's like to become an adult. Most adults, I'd wager, have a similar pool from which to draw: "I thought that having a job would mean that I could buy whatever I want. I assumed my parents just had bad taste in stuff and that's why we used a VHS player until 2005." Okay, well, maybe that's a little too specific. Instead, it's more like, "I assumed that, once I was an adult, I would understand better how to navigate the world." Or, the inverse realization: "I can't believe that being an adult just means you make it up as you go." A specific instance of my naivete? Parenting. I went on my LDS mission to Miami, Florida. There, I learned Spanish and worked with the Hispanic population. In the locker-room-of-a-rec-center-swimming-pool-type-of-humidity, I met a lot of people. In between worrying about passing out from heat stroke and trying to figure out how to keep business cards from clumping together in my pocket when they'd absorbed too much sweat/humidity/there's no palpable difference, I spent plenty of time in people's homes. The majority of those homes were members'; they'd invite us over on a regular basis for dinner. Most nights we had a DA (dinner appointment, which we'd also call a cita, meaning (creatively) "appointment" in Spanish, because we were just effortlessly cool like that, y'know?) and that would involve showing up, fumbling through some rough Spanish, eating the meals (many of which were great), and then delivering a spiritual thought/message before heading into the inky post-shower-humidity to get some more work done ere we went to bed. Whilst at these member homes, we would get a chance to interact with their kids. Almost all of them were second-generation immigrants, their parents having come from Guatemala, Peru, Chile, Venezuela, Colombia, Argentina, Spain, Cuba, El Salvador, Paraguay, Uruguay, and basically every other Spanish-speaking country. I did, actually, meet a couple of Mexicans, too, but they tended to live in the deeper south than where I served, so my knowledge of Mexican culture and accents is sparse. Anyway, the kids were almost always bilingual, knowing English from school and friends and Spanish from parents. The parents almost always understood English, but preferred to speak in Spanish. For me, that was wonderful, as I felt I needed to expand my understanding of the language and become a better speaker before I left. Nevertheless, speaking Spanish (or any new language) is hard, and I appreciated having the kids to chat with in English more often than not. It was a nice reprieve. Regardless of their linguistic lineages, these wonderful members always carried a beautiful commitment to the cultures they'd had to leave behind when they came to America. Some of the people I got to know were political refugees, while others wanted to pursue different lives than what they had at home. But just because they left their countries didn't mean that their countries had left them. Their national varieties were a wonderful contribution to the texture of Miami, broadly speaking, and within the comparatively-insular culture of the Church. And, because of these differences, I was exposed to different philosophies of parenting--an unexpected aspect of my twenty-four month voluntary religious excursion for the denomination in which I'd been raised. One night--sometime near the Christmas season of 2002--I was at a member's home. I can't remember their name (we only ate there once, I think), so we'll call them la familia Casca. The Casca family had a handful of kids--probably at least three, though I may be misremembering. As we sat about the table, my missionary companion and I talking with the parents, the two younger children ran about the family room, which adjoined the dining/kitchen area. Much like there's a filter that you can put on your phone's photos in order to ditch red-eye, become sepia-toned (like it's old-fashioned!), or incorporate a dog's ears onto your head, Mormons have a noise-filter that they almost always use. Particularly when religious stuff is being discussed--one of the fastest ways to get a child below the age of five into an incoherent ball of fussy energy is to bring up spiritual concepts; they're allergic to it--kids tend to get louder. While the filter isn't perfect, and a certain level of child-generated chaos will eventually break through, it's of a separate quality from the typical parent-of-a-screaming-child filter that most parents have installed. I say this so that you understand that the kids in the family room began to scream. That is, we finally heard them screaming. Before, I said that the dining area and the kitchen and the family room all sort of blended together. The two younglings--I'd guess ages five and three--had drifted from the family room into the kitchen. Their laughter and shrieks were all part of the background, as unremarkable as, say, the color of the paint on the walls (white) or the material of the floor (tile--I say this not because I have a specific memory of the material of the floor, but because that's simply what it was; South Florida has no understanding of the concept of carpet in their homes, as if the collective dictionary by which the entirety of Miami-Dade County consults is bereft of the word). In short, we had completely tuned them, and their location out. That meant that when the shriek that broke through our filters was recognized for what it was, there was a possible danger to the shriek. I looked up in time to see the five year old sprint past me, his round face panicked and his eyes wide. I imagine he was running to his bedroom, the hallway being on my right-hand side, and I seem to recall having a brief thought of, "I wonder why he is running so fast." These are the kinds of mysteries that a non-parent-adult has the luxury to ponder. A non-parent can look at a particular behavior and mull it over, trying to figure out the ramifications of the choices being made. "I see that little Jimmy is intent on determining the flammability of the cat. This is likely to end in Jimmy learning a lot about the natural world, specifically the ways in which cats dislike being combusted. I shall mentally document the results of my observations and compare them to my hypothesis. The scientific method is wonderful." Parents don't have that opportunity. It's given up, along with their insurance information, at the moment they go into the hospital for their first delivery. (It's in the fine-print.) Parent-adults see a problem, intervene, then, post-hoc, justify their behavior. "Well, of course I took away your dart gun. You…maybe…might have shot…at this fragile mug of cold tea that I, as a responsible adult, have left on the counter for the last six days!" So I had the chance to really puzzle at what this five year old could be fleeing from. After all, this flight-of-fight response was something I recognized based upon the occasional encounter with an angry dog on the other side of the fence or a Jehovah's Witness. But this kid was five! He won't be harangued for "selling Jesus!" or given the Cuban finger at his knock on the door for another thirteen years! How could he know what it takes to be scared and running for his life? Okay, so maybe I didn't contemplate all of that at the time. To be really honest, I likely thought something significantly less impressive, like, "Huh. Weird." And the really galling thing is, I probably didn't even think it in Spanish. As the five year old peeled past me, I became aware of a high-pitched, demoniacal cackle that I have since learned is not an environmentally-bequeathed sound, but is instead an innate sound that all children who can't yet formulate complete sentences can muster. It is the sound of joy at the misery of another. The basest human impulses--the laughing-when-someone-falls-down impulse, the shut-the-door-on-someone-running-to-catch-the-elevator impulse, the smash-the-bug-because-it's-there-not-because-it's-poisonous-I-mean-it's-just-an-ant-for-crying-out-loud impulse. It's the laughter of someone doing something mean just to be mean. It's the sound of a child who knows that he can't possibly be blamed for this because he's just a kid, Mom, so he doesn't understand, not really. But that's the part of the laughter that he has, the part that's lurking right beneath the surface--the Pennywise part of the laugh, if you will. Because he knows he shouldn't, and he knows he won't get blamed. That's what he's laughing at. In Mormon scripture, Alma claims that "wickedness never was happiness". Alma, I submit, had not encountered a three year old who had uttered that laugh. Because that's a kid who is ecstatic in his wickedness. The three year old rounded into view, his laughter peeling through the filter even better than his brother's scream. A joyous light was in his eyes. A grin that put the smiles of every Christmas morning to shame stretched across his face. Above his head, one pudgy fist clutching the handle with all the ferocity of possession, he held a cheese grater. Not one of those wimpy, flat-and-unimpressive types that seem to come from the store with tarnish on them. No, this was one of the gleaming kinds--the type that Shredder would look at and say, "Steady on, that's a bit much." Gaps, grooves, edges, holes--everything shimmered with a devilish glint, each a mouth eager to take a gleeful chunk out of whatever it was close to. In this case, it was the five year old brother. And here's the thing: I didn't get up to stop the kid. At least, not at first. No, instead I luxuriated in that precious non-parent-"adult" (I was, myself, only nineteen) indulgence of thinking before acting. I thought, I bet his parents let him play with that. I'd better not interfere. After all, I wouldn't want a stranger--even if it were a scrawny kid from the other side of the country whose arm was so thin you could put a rubber band around the bicep and still have slack--coming into my home and telling my kid how he ought to live. The audacity of such a behavior was repugnant. Do unto others as you would have done unto you, that was my missionary motto. "Uh…" said my companion, who was (read: is) a better person than I, "¿Hermana?" Since we're brothers and sisters in the Church, we called the adult women (regardless of their parental status, though most of them were mothers) "Hermana", which means "sister" in Spanish. It gets vague here. I'd like to think that my companion's words snapped me out of my smug self-assurance, pulling me into the real danger that the five year old kid was in, and that I leapt forward and snatched the cheese grater. Maybe I was the one who said, "Uh, ¿Hermana?" and it was my companion who saved the day. Maybe the tentative question, complete with correctly inverted question marks, was enough to get one of the parents to recognize the danger and intervene appropriately. Whatever the case was, the three year old's cheese grater was confiscated before he could do any harm. The kid then promptly burst into tears. |
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