Humor: a tool to learn

Humor: a tool to learn


Humor tends to be used in leisure and hobby situations: at home, with friends, etc. Youth and childhood laugh more times than adults do. So, laughter is a convenient andenjoyable dynamic day by day. Children and students are in the habit of using humor in the playground or even in class, but in this one, the intention is to laugh at someone, call the attention ordrive teacher to distraction. Nevertheless, talking about the use of humor to teach and to help students and children to increase their skills seems to be rare. Is it serious to say that the correct useof humor in classroom will help students not to get distracted and lost from the subject? Can we talk about “educactional humor”? Indeed, humor can become a tool for teaching. However it will be wrongif the reader is thinking about the teacher as a clown and the pupils as spectators. Mark Shatz (2006) says: “Professors’ jobs are to educate, not to entertain. But if humor can make the learningprocess more enjoyable, then I think everybody benefits as a result.”. So, humor can help pupils to improve their cognition and understanding symbolism and peers relationship; also, it can reduce anxietyand aggressiveness. But what we will need always is a creative teacher to dinamize humor, subject and pupils. Therefore, humor can become a tool to educate.
Humor improves cognition in children.“Cognitive level is significantly related to the child’s understanding of the joking relationship” says Klein (1987). Also says that if we told children to select a nonhumorous material and humorousmaterial, they’ll choose the last one. They are in the habit of laugh in the presence of incongruity or absurdities (a dog playing tennis), play, surprise, violation of concepts an social smiling. The factof understanding a joke, involves a cognitive mechanism itself. It stimulates the thinking of the child because he has to establish alleged associations of ideas. When a joke is told, incongruity...