Finding+Humor

=Finding Humor=

"Where do bees wait? At the buzz stop." Andrew, Age six

One of the most difficult things is to admit that one made a mistake. Like I mentioned earlier in “Listening with Understanding and Empathy,” to make admit to making mistake means to humble yourself and to admit that you were wrong. It involves being able to face the fact that we are not infallible. This is where humor comes in—it can diffuse the tenseness of a situation, perhaps through parody, satire, mocking, understatements, hyperboles, cheesy jokes, etc. But, finding humor can simply mean being able to laugh at the silly things in life, whether they be a mistake or just simply a comical situation.

That’s what I do all the time. My evidence? My wiki. Throughout my Habits of Mind portfolio, the use of deliberate sarcasm, the capitalization (Highly Intelligent Classmate (TM)), the snide jabs (“Just ask Romeo”), etc etc. Laughing at oneself makes it simpler to reflect—after all, we are criticizing ourselves and finding ways to improve ourselves while keeping in mind our positive attributes to prevent some pity party from happening.

In addition, in a more “practical” example, in class, it has almost become a tradition/ritual for the girls to mix up all the liquids at the end of a lab activity. No matter what the experiment is, at the end, we ALWAYS pour all the liquids into one container and stir. Like mentioned in “Responding With Wonderment and Awe,” we get a distinct feeling of satisfaction when we do so. The boys find humor in this situation by laughing at our silliness and predictability and oohing-and-ahhing. We find humor in this with just how beautiful the colors meld with each other and laugh at how we always do this. Every time. Without fail. One particular incident strikes out at me—I believe we added a carbonate with an acid, and forgot that the mixture would bubble. It overflowed (all that nice foam just flowed out of the beaker), wetting the entire table. We just couldn’t stop laughing out of shock.

Finding humor is a habit one must have in life, otherwise one will be miserable from all the seriousness and sadness.



Figure 1: The beaker that overflowed.



Figure 1: Just us, playing around with the beakers and liquids.