I Choose Laughter

It has become habit, as a teacher, to take time over the summer to reflect.  What were the struggles during the year?  How would I have handed situations with certain students differently? Do I know that my students are better readers and writers after being in my class? Did I prepare them enough for their next year in high school?  But recently, one question has been added to my list: did we laugh enough?

Laughter has become one of the most important aspects in my classroom and my hallway. Years ago, my fellow colleague John Knapp started doing "Friday Funny" videos. And, like any good teacher does, I (and a majority of our department) stole this idea. Friday is one of the most popular days in our hallway because the students know we are going to start every hour with laughter. Of course, there are times that my idea of funny and their idea of funny are not exactly the same, and they remind me that I am 20+ years older than they are, but we still laugh. They dislike when we have a 3-day weekend that starts on Friday, and they beg like crazy to watch our funny on Thursday.

I think about the time a few years ago that my students followed me down the hallway as I had to go talk to a math teacher about a student's grade. I had no idea they were behind me - they were so stealth-like. The math teacher saw them coming, read and understood their signals for him to be quiet, and then continued to have a conversation with me while they hid behind me. Imagine my surprise to turn around and be scared half to death by my entire class. It was hilarious. We laughed about that the rest of the year.

We laughed our tails off during my 5th hour this year, nearly every. single. class. period.  It was unlike any class I had every taught before.  It was class of 13 boys, and 2 very, very quiet girls.  I'll be honest, at the beginning of the year I was quite nervous as to how this class would develop and engage with each other in our learning journey.  It was not always easy.  Some expectations had to be established, but once they were - WE LAUGHED.  These kids knew when and how to crack jokes that were appropriate, well-timed, and fall-out-of-your-chair funny.  Whether it was giving each other a hard time about Chevy trucks (or was it Fords) or making funny sounds as my paras and I walked into class, they were always laughing.  Now that the year is over, I wished that I had written down the shenanigans of this class, but to me, they will always be the class that made me laugh more than any other, yet they had the amazing ability to turn it off and get to work. 

They had no idea what was written on these boards.

This is what they wanted to do after they realized what I wrote.

My department laughs. In the hallway, it is not uncommon to see 2-3 of us dancing between class periods. It is not uncommon to have a rap battle as Greg Froese and I spit the lyrics to Rob Bass's "It Takes Two". It is not uncommon for one of us to start class by entering doing the running man. Okay, so maybe I am the only one doing the running man, but another one of my colleagues often breaks into the cabbage patch (I won't share his name, but his initials are Jason Kohls, I mean J.K.). 

Sometimes as a teacher, things get tough. The weight of planning, grading, emailing, politics can be pretty heavy. So what do we do? We laugh. We may rearrange each other's classrooms from time to time. (His students loved it - they wanted to keep it that way and have class on the floor.)

Proof.

We may steal the chairs of teachers who were gone for professional learning, and we may make them find said chairs by completing a scavenger hunt written in limerick form. We may take selfies and hide them in other teachers' classrooms - behind their coffee makers, in their teachers manuals, framed on the wall, or tucked away in books that won't be used until next year. We may move a colleague's clock from the east wall in his room to the west; any educator can tell you about the chaos something as simples as changing the location of a clock or picture can bring. We may have many more jokes and pranks to play on each other, but one thing is for sure -- WE WILL LAUGH. Why? Because it is fun. Because these kids are fun. Because teaching them each day is a true blessing, so why not fill it with laughter.

Our students need to see us happy.  They need to see that we like each other and that we love our jobs.  They need to see us being loud, excited, and positive.  Laughter is a cheap and easy way to do just that. I love my job. I love my colleagues. I love my students. I love how much they make me laugh. I choose laughter. When we laugh, we build relationships; when we build relationships, learning happens.