Humour in Education

The issue of humor in education is as old as Adam, nevertheless it is permanently re-examined and updated.

Beyond the principles of a modern and student-centred school, for several educators (and even for some parents), the classical image of school is one that embodies absolute seriousness (while the image of the learning effort doesn’t seem to have much in common with a class that laughs or with students that always keep a smile on their faces).
Many a time, humour in a school activity is confounded with superficiality (I even heard at some point how a parent, being revolted against the laughing sounds that came from his child’s class, pointed out: ʽIs this school or amusement?ʼ)

When is happening a crisis situation in teacher`s career?

This is a comparative analysis regarding teacher`s needs for training. One item is related to the period when a crisis may occur.

Which was the period of time during your career when most frequent crisis situation happened/occurred?

                                                                         Research 2000       Research 2010

a. In the first year:                                                  33,23%                 49%

b. Between 1 and 3 years                                       26,00%                 27,9%

c. Between 4 and 8 years                                       11, 35%                 10%

d. Between 9 and 15 years                                     12,45%                    5%

e. Between 16 and 20 years                                     6,59%                     2,7%

f. Over 20 years                                                      11,38%                   5,4%

Do colors influence us? What a teacher / a parent must know

An educator (either a parent or a teacher) must take into consideration several elements of the environment surrounding his child. Some of these can have a great impact on him, even though they might be harder to seize upon. I remember an episode that I saw last summer in a park. 

Two children were running down an alley (it was a race, they wanted to know who was faster). The child who won didn’t seem neither stronger nor more athletic than the one who lost. I noticed him though due to his glowing red T-shirt (for that matter, his face was also quite red at the end of the race). I then remembered an interesting experiment which showed that nothing happens by chance and that colors have a serious influence upon our lives. Hill and Barton studied the Olympics playoffs and noticed that those who were wearing the red T-shirt during the game (boxing, wrestling etc.) had 50% more wins than those wearing the blue T-shirt. Then again, the T-shirts were balloted before every confrontation. Red (the color of blood and aggressiveness) worked both as an activator for the one wearing it and as an inhibitor for the opponent. The opposite happened with blue, the color of relaxation, which also symbolizes calmness, unity and leisure.

Guide for motivating teachers (II)

* Excerpt from my book - Motivation for teaching career, Bucharest University Publishing House, 2010 (see entire book in the right column of site)

Exercise 5

What do I need to be more motivated?

Some things are obvious and there can be said that each of us knows very well the things necessary to feel motivated. Generally that is true but this thing happens only at the level of fundamental motives. But your motivation profile is far from being made up only by two-three aspects. We are rather talking about a complex network of elements; the main ones are more difficult to be dealt with because their position in the conscious zone proves the fact that even if you knew what leads in a decrease in your motivation, you have not had the opportunity so far to overcome this state of the art.

In return, the less obvious reasons, which were unconscious as such, have more chances to be solved. Think about the following analogy: the case of shareholders’ general meeting in a firm. You want to convince the meeting, but you have few chances to do so at the level of the main shareholders. However, the “small” shareholders, with little power by themselves can influence the balance of votes for your proposal if they are individually convinced. In the same way, even if the main motivators cannot be solved there is still a chance to support your motivation by listing a more extended enumeration of attractive elements for the teacher career. 

10 things that motivate me to be a teacher:

Guide for motivating teachers (I)

* Excerpt from my book - Motivation for teaching career, Bucharest University Publishing House, 2010

Exercise 1:

Evaluate your own motivation for being a teacher on a scale from 1 to 10 (where 1 is the lowest level of motivation and 10 the highest). Where are you at this moment in time? Do not try to justify your choice. Go for the first choice you can think of. This intuitive option represents your START point.

Motivation for teaching career
1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10

Exercise 2

What motivates you?

Initial stage/phase

Think about the motivation typology described above. Analyse your own motivation for the teaching career. To what type of motivation it is related? 

Types of motives	Rank (1 minimum/lowest rank minim, ... maximum/highest rank)	Justification
Motivation of power
Motivation of achievement
Motivation of affectivity
Motivation of approval
Motivation of curiosity

Digital childhood today, online family tomorrow?

When talking to parents and teachers, a serious issue comes forth more and more often: both parents and teachers display increased problems in understanding children/students and many of them experience an acute feeling of helplessness when confronted with situations that seem inextricable. The little ones seem to be building their own world, inaccessible to their parents and educators and thus the gap between generations becomes deeper and deeper.

An important factor of this change is the Internet. To children that are born in a digital world everything seems natural, but grown-ups (parents and teachers) don't perceive this problem in the same way. In 2001, Mark Prensky coined a major distinction: he talked about digital natives (those who were born or are born with their fingers on the keyboard and who are native speakers of this digital language of computers, video games and the Internet) and digital immigrants. The latter ones, although manage somehow to adapt to this new world, are very similar to geographical immigrants: even if they learn a new language, they always retain their accent and they can never be as fluent as the children born there. More than that, some specialists have even talked about digital aliens (those who never manage to assimilate the language of the digital world).

What happens when children are natives and their parents are immigrants? They don't speak the same language and children have a different perception of the world, they disown their parents' authority (and the authority of many other institutions, including school)! The explanation is simple: the Internet provides an extensive freedom to its user, or at least much more than a parent or an educator could provide. Bugeja (apud Selwyn, 2009) notes that all these could lead to a culture of disrespect between young people and formal institutions (including family and school).