BETWEEN A ROCK & A HARD PLACE: THE ROLE OF HUMOR IN GEOLOGY

Why should your students be the only ones allowed to have fun in the classroom? What! Your students don't have fun in the classroom? This is the absence of a laughing matter (technically, a punconformity, or humor hiatus) and has to be taken seriously. Humor can be incorporated into almost every aspect of a geology course, from the opening lecture to the final exam, helping to make the course more enjoyable and more effective. In the same way that you don’t have to be a great outdoors person to lead great field trips, you don’t have to a "funny" person to effectively utilize humor to your advantage. In fact, the less funny you are, or try to be, the greater the impact of whatever form of humor you employ. Opportunities abound from pervasive puns to ironic (or silicic) instances of personal experiences that went wrong. Story telling is the essence of good teaching, and personal tales endear you to the students and erode the image of an inaccessible instructor that can be so destructive in trying to establish classroom rapport. Laughter is no longer frowned upon, and helps to generate a classroom atmosphere that increases involvement as well as attendance. Strategies will be discussed for including humor in the syllabus, on exams, in the laboratory or lecture hall and in the field. Humor, like geology, is a multi-sensory subject. There are sight gags, physical humor, shaggy dog tales, even funny sound effects. Sensory stimuli are readily available from a great variety of sources, and can be easily incorporated into the body of a presentation to greatly enhance its impact. Like a stream, students attempting to achieve grade will always try to lighten their load, and, when appropriate, they should be encouraged to do so by incorporating humor into class presentations and reports. The baseline, of course, is learning, and so remember, it's impossible for a student to laugh and sleep at the same time. Humor involves active learning.