Vaibhav Devanathan

If you are not convinced about using humour in your classroom, here are some reasons about why you should give its use some serious thought.

In keeping with our cover theme of the month, we asked teachers to share lighter moments from their classrooms with us. From the several responses we received, we feature here a few that had us holding our sides. We hope you enjoy reading these as much as we enjoyed putting them together for you. Trouble in the same cell One day in class, I was narrating the story of Krishna’s birth. I told my students how reacting to a divine prophecy that foretold his death, Kamsa ended up killing seven of Vasudeva and Devaki’s children before Krishna. One bright student put up his hand and asked, “Ma’am why could Kamsa not have imprisoned Devaki and Vasudeva in different cells? Then they would not have had any children! The rest of the students burst out laughing and I found it difficult to control them. Srijaya Char The toilet mystery One day in my senior English class the boys told me to watch a skit they had made on “Who killed Duncan?” They brought in Sherlock Holmes to cross-examine Macbeth. At one stage Holmes says to Macbeth, “Your Majesty, I desire now to interview your royal wife, her majesty the Queen.” To which Macbeth replied, “Sire, she is to the toilet gone.” (In the end they all agreed it was suicide.) Brendan Mac Carthaigh Walking the talk I was co-facilitating a session for 40 principals with my partner who is British. When explaining the purpose of a Learning Walk, he dramatically pulled off his shoe and said, “So this is what I used as my tool! I wore out the leather on the corridors of the school.” Watching the horrified expressions of the principals I realized what they were thinking and rushed to explain that he meant the shoe was used for walking the corridors and not for beating his students with!! Kavita Anand Geometric designs One day I was teaching geometrical shapes in class. As I started talking about two dimensional shapes like triangles, quadrilaterals, and special quadrilaterals like the parallelogram, square, rectangle, rhombus, and kite, I observed some students whispering. I went to them quietly and asked what the matter was. One of the children answered, “Madam, all these shapes are on your saree pallu.”I immediately raised my saree pallu to see and the entire class started searching for the shapes we were learning about. That was indeed a funny moment. As I continued the same lesson the next day, the students said, “Madam you