K-BLOG 11: Humor: The that Keeps Your Students Intrigued and Engaged
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The Challenge:
A good educator will certainly have strong pedagogical skills. Educators will have well organized lesson plans, a variety of activities for their students to engage in, be organized and compassionate and be able to control classroom behavior. Those pieces are part of the package for anyone who successfully works with students. But the glue that holds all those skills together, making an educator truly outstanding, is humor. All your key pedagogical skills will be enhanced with humor, and it will be easier to reach your students with humor.
A Solution:
Humor is a personal characteristic, there is no one way to be funny or one way to create a fun classroom or homeschool atmosphere. It took me many years of teaching to figure out how to integrate and balance humor into my teaching. Humor needs to be strategic and tempered in a way that makes students and the teachers feel joyful, relaxed and motivated to learn. Besides music, (see: https://www.k12stemspace.com/k-blog/music-helps-everyone-learn) I loved using humorous videos that related to the topic that the students were studying. Below are are five examples. I always try to search the Internet for humorous, lesson topic-related videos to add to my lessons.
Resources:
The music video of the classic song “We are the World” from 1985 should be watched before the next video down on the list. It is fun to watch and listen to this music video with students in combination with the next one down. You can make fun of the 1980’s together.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9AjkUyX0rVw
This video is about PCR and DNA amplification. You will see that it is hysterical in conjunction with the above song.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5yPkxCLads
This video is called “Grocery Store Wars.” It is a splendid video that can be used as a jumping off point to the study of nutrition and issues of the environment and agriculture. It is a hilarious spoof of the original Star Wars movie.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVrIyEu6h_E
“The Molecular Shape of You” A Capella parody of Ed Sheeran’s song “Shape of you” Related to chemistry and physics.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8FAJXPBdOg
A song about NASA using the k-pop song by South Korean rapper Psy, “Gangnam Style”
