18: If you were to be a street performer, what would be your act? #LifeWideLearning16 @MrChase
— Ben Wilkoff (@bhwilkoff) January 18, 2016
This post is part of a daily conversation between Ben Wilkoff and me. Each day Ben and I post a question to each other and then respond to one another. You can follow the questions and respond via Twitter at #LifeWideLearning16.
16: Which job(s) will be the last to be automated? #lifewidelearning16 @MrChase
— Ben Wilkoff (@bhwilkoff) January 16, 2016
Humorists and comedians have always been the smartest people in the world. Being funny, making people laugh, getting them to understand the absurdity of life without bringing them to tears because of its abject cruelty takes a nuanced intellect. It must hold both the pure factual knowledge valued in commerce and scientific endeavors as well as the emotional capacity for deep empathy necessary for understanding what’s happening in the minds of audience members.
From there, our best jesters must present to audiences and readers a factually-correct story that mines a shared emotional reaction across lived experiences in a way that brings laughter and sometimes joy.
Machines will someday take over the sciences. They’ll see all the emperical data and analyze them toward whatever ends bring balance to a given equation. In a similar way, given enough if/then statements, machines will likely become our counselors. Analyzing the case histories of enough patients and a complex linguistic algorithm, they’ll be our therapists if not our friends.
The intersection of these two worlds, where our funniest people have always found their most profound material, will remain the last stronghold of humanity. Siri will respond to my request for a joke with a joke, but Siri does not understand why a joke is a joke. It is similarly incapable of understanding how to tailor a joke to my particular sense of humor, intellect, and experiences. Siri can’t read a room.
This post is part of a daily conversation between Ben Wilkoff and me. Each day Ben and I post a question to each other and then respond to one another. You can follow the questions and respond via Twitter at #LifeWideLearning16.
Words! Words! Words! I’m so sick of words!
– Eliza Doolittle
I might be in a little over my head.
I just woke up my phone to check the time.
Twenty-one people are waiting for my next move on Words with Friends.
Every time I get the chance, I chip away at my waiting games. On a good run, I can knock out five turns before the rest of life jumps in. But they keep. Coming. Back.
They keep challenging me.
I’m not even sure how it got this bad. I remember sharing my user name with maybe three people, never 21.
I’m not even very good. Of the 21 games queued up, I’m losing around 80% of them. Still, I play.
Then there are the invites at the end of the game. Just as my phone alerts me to my defeat and I click “re-match,” that same friend begins yet another game with me. In the face of such double booking, a rational person would resign from one game and keep the other game in play.
That’s just what they want you to do. Admit defeat before every playing a move? No, sir, thank you very much. If I’m to lose, it will be a beautiful and bloody battle.
Then there are the cheaters.
You know who you are…cough…Robbie…cough. Cheaters I’ve perhaps taught for two years in a row and with whose vocabularies I am well familiar. “Shoon?” Really?
Again, the rational person would resign the game knowing their vocabulary was reduced to a switchblade in the face of the nuclear armament of online Words with Friends cheating sites.
Not I.
For losses to a cheater are the sweetest losses of all. If I lose to a cheater, I can tell myself that I would otherwise have won, which, ipso facto, makes me the winner…who lost.
I’m not losing these games because I’m stupid. I’ve got words in my head. I’ve been gearing up for all 21 of these battles since I was in middle school and thought accusing friends of having “minuscule vernaculars” was the best blend of adolescent humor and linguistic insult one was likely to find.
At issue is my lack of strategy. I’m smart, but don’t play smartly. I like the words too much to toss them around like taudry tiles which have no more use to me than to help me score. Oh, I’ll score, but when I do, it will be because I’ve shaped and sculpted my letters into a Monet of syllables. Grown men will weep and children will feel a deep and abiding sense of hope.
And then, I will lose.
A joke is a very serious thing.
– Winston Churchill
It’s difficult to be funny in China. I know, right? All those people, and you’d think it would be easier for a viral case of the giggles. Evidently not.
I’m a little worried the same may be true for the teaching profession.
A few days ago, I wrote about a faculty volleyball game at SLA. The comments I received about the post both on and offline led me to wonder and worry a little that educators aren’t bringing the funny as much as they should.
We have to laugh.
In my second year of teaching, the middle school team I taught on had lunch together once a week in our team prep room. Every once in a while, we would order Chinese food.
The kid of the team, I imparted some cultural wisdom to my colleagues as we finished our meal one day.
“You know how to read your fortune, right?” I said.
Everyone looked at me.
“You read it aloud and you add ‘in bed’ to the end.”
Everyone on the team saw me as young and impetuous. If they didn’t see me as their son, they saw me as their little brother. I was to be humored.
One teacher on our team was all business. She was there to teach and the children were there to learn. Anything else during class time was to be corrected. What’s more, the rest of the teachers and I knew very little about her. “Touchy feely” was certainly not a phrase we used to describe her.
We began to open our fortune cookies. I was trepidacious as we grew nearer and nearer her turn.
Finally, the moment arrived.
“You will be lucky in many things.”
Nothing.
Such a buzzkill.
Two second later.
“…in bed.”
And we were ruined. For 5 minutes, this stoic pillar of order and reason laughed uncontrollably, her face beet red. And we all joined in.
It was a rare moment of total levity.
We needed it.
In rest of my time on that team, every once in a while, I’d pass a colleague and have to stifle a giggle as they whispered “…in bed.”
Whether it’s the jokes section of Reader’s Digest or the Onion News Network, funny must be injected into the day if your’e going to make it in teaching and be able to relate to people in any kind of way that makes them want to relate to you.
So here’s my question – Where’s your funny? I’m serious. Where do you look for the humor during your day. Is it a book or a website?
We can and do share our daily trials. We share how our students make us proud. We share frustrations with our administrations and the newest tools we’ve found. Take a moment, today, and share the funny.
I’ll start it off.
I love to laugh.
– Uncle Albert, Mary Poppins
You know what made Captain Kirk great?
Not the countless rescues of the planet(s) cum galaxies cum universe((s)?).
Not his rainbow of romantic conquests.
Not..his…ExceptionalCadenceWhenSpeaking.
James Tiberius Kirk was great because he could have fun. The guy heeded Mary Poppins’s advice, and took a spoonful of sugar on each mission.
Almost every episode ended with Jim, Bones and Spock on the bridge ribbing each other as though they’d forgotten thwarting death once again.
Lately, it strikes me the fun is neglected more often than not when we talk about teaching.
I’m not talking learning.
I’m talking teaching.
It’s fun.
Seriously.
My best days in the classroom are those in which I do one hundred silly things before lunch. If I’ve taken my work seriously, but not myself, I’ve done alright.
I don’t get the feeling programs like KIPP put too much stock in silly.
That might be the real danger.
If we’re truly facing some of the most complex challenges of the modern or any era, building classrooms of Borg is not the answer.
Success should include an element of silly.
Saturday, Diana, Ros and I led a session at EduCon on interdisciplinarity. The ideas were flying, and nearly 50 educators from all over the country joined us.
We spoke of supports and obstacles. We shared resources and we networked. We deliberated on the existence of common ground between scripted and project-based curricula. Many pieces of the conversation challenged my thinking.
The most tweeted moment from the session?
A joke I made.
No profession should ever be this starved for funny.
Yes, times are hard. Yes, the policy debate looks like it was designed on the island of Dr. Moreau. Yes, budgets are drying up faster than Cuba Gooding Jr.’s career.
And, we’ll get all of that sorted out.
First and always, let’s have a little levity.
It will save us.
When Mike Myers faced off with James Lipton on Inside the Actor’s Studio, Myers commented on the most important lessons he’d learned while growing up poor.
His parents taught him the value of free fun and of silly.
I’ll buy that.
When I hear about the incredibly high burnout rates of new teachers, I cannot help but think their professors taught them how to teach, but not how to have fun doing it.
And, it’s too much work not to have fun doing it.
I love teaching because teaching the whole child requires me to be my whole self. Every day, I access my passion for learning and asking questions – all the while looking for the funny.
Seriousness of mission and purpose need not mean seriousness in execution.
