Resources

Due to a snow delay, my seven-year-old daughter came with me to class the other day. I teach an honors’ version of our intro Religions of the World course in the morning. She sat at a desk in the back corner of the room, working on a story about, I think, vampires. She nibbled on peanuts. She was the world’s cutest TA. At the end of class, as we were walking back to the car, she said, “Mom, I noticed that the students didn’t laugh at any of your jokes.” A pause. “Was this EMBARRASSING for you??” I laughed and told her, “No, not really, I’m used to it.” I like being a silly willy,” I said, “and it doesn’t really matter to me if they like it.” Most of my students don’t get my sense of humor. They don’t know the references that some of my jokes depend on; I once made mention of the TV show Friends in a class and all I got back were blinking eyeballs. This was not a high point. We don’t share much these days, me and my students. I constantly feel like that Steve Buscemi gif (“How do you do, fellow kids?”). Or maybe my students do get my jokes and they simply don’t think the jokes are all that good. Oh well. ¯_(ツ)_/¯ Silliness can be tricky (and is often presented as inappropriate) in professional contexts. Obviously, people don’t always find the same jokes funny. We may worry about offending. Enough self-deprecating digs and we may start to inadvertently undermine ourselves. There are definitely risks to making light of certain topics—or even being perceived as doing so. (Though some of the sharpest social critiques come in the form of satire, like The Onion simply reposting the same story about gun violence every time a mass shooting occurs in the United States.) But I also sense a resistance to silliness (and playfulness and jokes and levity and all the like) in certain corners of academia, specifically. There seems to be an association between being serious and being taken seriously. That somehow our intellectual cachet or credentials are tied to big words and furrowed brows and the cult of busyness. Certainly we academics have a reputation for humorless stuffiness, paired properly with a tweed jacket and a pocket watch, of course, even if it isn’t true. I do worry sometimes that people think I’m light on substance simply because I’m quick to laugh. Some scholars have written about how incorporating humor into the classroom can have benefits for students and their learning. I would like for this to be true in my classroom too—at the very least, I don’t want my jokes to HARM anyone—but this isn’t mainly why I deploy humor. It’s not some savvy or strategic teaching technique. I do it because this is a part of who I am—an important part of who I am—and I do not want to have to become a different, fragmented, or shell of a person when I teach (or do any other part of my job). I want to be whole—as whole as I can possibly be—when I show up in the classroom. There is enough emotional labor involved in teaching (and I’m using this term in the way Arlie Hochschild actually meant it) to tire even the best of us out. Not being authentic during the hours I teach requires additional levels of effort and exhaustion that I simply do not want to exert, if I can help it. And I want students to witness this wholeness, even if it turns out not to be their cup of tea. (Not unrelated, this is part of the reason I brought my kid to class. I’m a mom…and I refuse to pretend I’m not in order to be “professional.”) My self is not there to please students—or to conform to what (I assume or can discern) they might find pleasing. Who I am is not (or should not be) up for others’ approval or adjudication. Maybe there is a lesson in that for them too. Now, as I’ve written before, there are obviously risks to disclosing who we really are in the classroom, especially depending on the identities some of us hold. (And there are aspects of our whole selves that do not deserve to be shared with people like students who haven’t necessarily earned our trust.) But being silly is an aspect of my personality that feels genuine and low-stakes enough to bring into the classroom space. It feels good to be me, for as many hours of the day as possible. For what it’s worth, my daughter doesn’t think I’m very funny either. She’ll get me some day. Or she won’t. It doesn’t matter. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

My teaching style has always been a bit on the lighthearted side; I crack jokes, use ridiculous metaphors, draw inelegant pictures on the whiteboard and make my students guess what I’m trying to convey in an odd version of academic Pictionary. Being funny is a great way to keep students engaged! But now that my school, along with everyone else’s, has gone fully online for the duration of the semester, I’ve had to reframe my humor–what I usually think of as a useful teaching tactic, I now see as an indispensable tool for teaching effectively in a global pandemic. It’s already cliché to say that everybody’s stressed out by this health crisis, but the sheer variety of ways to be stressed is staggering, and my students seem to embody every one of them. I teach at a women’s college where traditional undergraduates learn alongside non-traditional working students; about a quarter of whom are parents. We’re heavy on the health sciences, so while lots of our undergrads are suddenly unemployed from their server and retail jobs, those who work in pharmacies, elder care, and hospitals are being begged to pick up extra shifts. My classes are an eclectic combination of the desperately bored and the profoundly overworked. The only thing they all seem to have in common is how badly they need a laugh right now. I can’t cure their anxiety, but I can offer them a momentary opportunity to forget about it while they’re smirking at one of my quips. These little breaks are a big part of how we can cope with our new normal. I usually rely on reading a room for my jokes, so I’ve had to get more creative. I’m terrible at creating dynamic PowerPoints, for example, and I’m now using them for nearly every lecture. To keep things interesting, I insert snarky comments into my slides making fun of my own dismal formatting and don’t call attention to them while I present, leaving them like Easter eggs for the attentive watcher. When I require Zoom meetings, I ask every attendee if they have a nearby pet or small child they can put on screen for the rest of us to coo over before beginning our discussion. I’m still teaching loads of content in the midst of all these less-serious moments, but it’s obvious that the content flows better when I make space to be a little silly. When my students pop up on webcam to talk about their upcoming papers, they’re visibly tense–this disappears almost immediately when I say that I do want to talk about their paper, but I also insisted on this meeting because I’m lonely and want to be reminded that other humans exist. They smile, I smile back, and for a second or two, they feel better–and then are better able to listen and learn. Beyond benefiting my students, prioritizing humor also helps me look forward to teaching and gives me a hint of that refreshing energy I used to get from being in the classroom with so many personalities. Staring at my laptop for hours on end is a little more bearable when I’m also thinking about whether there’s a way I can insert a picture of a chicken into my presentation so it’ll flash on screen at random intervals while I’m talking. Teaching is a haven for me amid my own apprehension, and it feels even more purposeful when I can try to make it haven for my students too. There is no one teaching style that will spell perfect success in this tumultuous time, but for even the most serious professor, I urge you–try for some silliness! Change your Zoom background so you look like you’re lecturing from the middle of the zombie apocalypse, offer pictures of your  pet as a reward for students completing required tasks, come up with a rude nickname for your online learning platform (I like to refer to Canvas[1] as “that jerkwad”) and use it whenever part of your haphazardly constructed course site doesn’t work the way you thought it would. Give yourself the gift of being a little ridiculous, and you’ll find that your students’ attitudes–and their work–will benefit from the break. [1] No offense to Canvas. It is a beautiful, elegant system, even when I can’t for the life of me figure out why it keeps taking assignments off of the student to-do list.