In point of fact, using humor in the classroom is one of the easiest ways I know to become a beloved and effective teacher. But it requires skill. It is like dancing barefoot in a mine field that is littered with pit traps for trapping tigers. See how I linked the title to my opening paragraph there? Kids in the classroom don’t… unless you make it funny. Sometimes they want you to fall in the tiger trap on purpose even though there are punji sticks at the bottom. They want to see what the consequences of the mistake really are so they are not surprised when they immediately make that same mistake.
So, let me tell you about a few of those tiger traps and how to navigate through them.
Poo-Poo Jokes
Yes, one of the unfortunate truths about humor in the classroom is that nothing is funnier to middle school and high school kids than references to sticky brown stuff. (If that last statement made you snicker, then you know that it even goes beyond school.) And it can be a devastating thing on fragile, fledgling egos in a school environment where boys will invariably stick a half-eaten chocolate bar in a back pocket on a hot day even though they are wearing khaki-colored jeans. Over-reacting to a sudden fragrance from one of a number of volatile digestive systems packed into the same small classroom can completely empty the room and imperil the teacher’s job. (Principals don’t appreciate unauthorized leaving of the classroom… so teachers need to quickly learn how to calm-and-continue in an unusually gassy environment.) Of course, the girl leading the lemming rush out of the classroom under gas attack is usually the one who dealt it. But you can’t point that out without crushing some young flower’s petals of self-image. It is necessary to lay down fences of regulation at the beginning of the school year to regulate exactly how brown and sticky a bathroom joke can actually be before it traps you in eternal detention.
Hurt-y Humor
There is the kind of humor that numerous comedians use as their fall-back style, that Don Rickles-esque “Your mama’s so fat that satellites can see her from space”sort of humor. It is also a highly tiger-trappy sort of humor to use in the classroom. Students don’t perform well after being the butt of slappy-face-style put-downs. You don’t want to remind the kid in the back row of how he mixed up the words “pied” and “peed” in last week’s read-aloud right before taking the State science test that will determine his educational future and your next evaluation. So how do you resist the urge to tell the snooty little cheerleader that just told you her mom is going to get you fired that she’s got a tail of toilet paper hanging down from the back of her skirt… when she actually does… and the football player she most idolizes is watching every move she makes with that big, tart and trippy tongue of hers? You take pity on them, and remember that if you break them down into tears in front of their peers you are doing the same thing to them that Bully Bob Beegshout did to you back in high school. Self-deprecating humor is far more effective at defusing a confrontation. You get them to laugh at themselves by making them see themselves in the story you just told on yourself. You can often make them laugh themselves right out of the bad behavior that way. (Oh, and I didn’t point out the toilet paper, but you can wait until someone else inevitably does and karma can balance the universe in that way.)
So, now that I have rolled well past the 500-word goal and still haven’t used up the whole list of tiger traps, I suppose it is time to reveal there will be a follow-up to this post.
Catch a Falling Star 
A Mr. Holland Moment
Life is making music. We hum, we sing to ourselves, movie music plays in our head as the soundtrack to our daily life. At least, it does if we stop for a moment and dare to listen. We make music in many different ways. Some play guitar. Some are piano players. And some of us are only player pianos. Some of us make music by writing a themed paragraph like this one. Others make an engine sing in the automotive shop. Still others plant gardens and make flowers or tomatoes grow. I chose teaching kids to read and write. The music still swells in my ears four years after retiring.
The 1995 movie, Mr. Holland’s Opus, is about a musician who thinks he is going to write a magnificent classical orchestra opus while teaching music at a public high school to bring in money and allow him time to compose and be with his young wife as they start a new family.
But teaching is not, of course, what he thought it was. He has to learn the hard way that it is not an easy thing to open up the closed little clam shells that are the minds of students and put music in. You have to learn who they are as people first. You have to learn to care about what goes on in their lives, and how the world around them makes them feel… and react to what you have to teach. Mr. Holland has to learn to pull them into music appreciation using rock and roll and music they like to listen to, teaching them to understand the sparkles and beats and elements that make it up and can be found in all music throughout their lives. They can even begin to find those things in classical music, and appreciate why it has taken hold of our attention for centuries.
And teaching is not easy. You have to make sacrifices. Big dreams, such as a magnum opus called “An American Symphony”, have to be put on the shelf until later. You have children, and you find that parenting isn’t easy either. Mr. Holland’s son is deaf and can never actually hear the music that his father writes from the center of his soul. And the issue of the importance of what you have to teach becomes something you have to fight for. Budget cuts and lack of funding cripples teachers in every field, especially if you teach the arts. Principals don’t often appreciate the value of the life lessons you have to give. Being in high school band doesn’t get you a high paying job later.
But in the end, at the climax of the movie, the students all come back to honor Mr. Holland. They provide a public performance of his magnum opus, his life’s work. And the movie ends with a feeling that it was all worth it, because what he built was eternal, and will be there long after the last note of his music is completely forgotten. It is in the lives and loves and memories of his students, and they will pass it on.
But this post isn’t a movie review. This post is about my movie, my music. I was a teacher in the same way Mr. Holland was. I learned the same lessons about being a teacher as he did. I had the same struggles to learn to reach kids. And my Mr. Holland moment wasn’t anywhere near as big and as loud as Mr. Holland’s. His was performed on a stage in front of the whole school and alumni. His won Richard Dreyfus an Academy Award for Best Actor. But his was only fictional.
Mine was real. It happened in a portable building on the Naaman Forest High School campus. The students and the teacher in the classroom next door threw a surprise party for me. They made a lot of food to share, almost all of which I couldn’t eat because of diabetes. And they told me how much they would miss me, and that they would never forget me. And I had promised myself I would never cry about having to retire. But I broke my promise. In fact, I am crying now ten years later. But they are not tears of sadness. My masterwork has now reached its last, bitter-sweet notes. The crescendos have all faded. But the music of our lives will still keep playing. And not even death can silence it completely.
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