Laughter in the classroom.

In my educational internet travels the above image popped up. As a lover of humor and generally goofy person I began to wonder if there are any resources that could help me use my sense of silliness in my curriculum. In search of literature on the refined pedagogy of the comedian I unearthed the following:

Learning through Laughter: Humor in the Classroom - a book which is sadly not in our library. Christmas is just around the corner. If any one of my 3 readers wanted to track this down and buy it for me I would be oh so grateful. :-)

http://www.humorworks.com/video.php - a video created by an author (who happens to hold a PhD in...something) about the value of humor. Haven't watched it yet, but it's on the do list.

Laugh and Learn: Humor and Learning a Second Language - not specific to teaching art but there is bound to be something I can use in there...I skimmed this document, it is full of charts and graphs, which are all very not-humorous. I will save this and my other gold nuggets above for when my schedule is isn't so...."end of the semester-y".

Do you forget things?

Being forgetful is a fact of life. I just discovered lumosity.com - a sort of gym for working your memory out. This is the sort of extracurricular activity I will encourage my students to do, because challenging your brain is always a good thing.

Are you a writer?

A friend of mine was telling about he stays motivated to complete writing by using a resource called nanowrimo. I was immediately intrigued. I wonder if this sort of resource could be modified to help students work on a longterm art project in someway.

If you're a writer and you're interested in this sort of resource, check it out:

http://www.nanowrimo.org/