Enough of the heavy stuff!  After the serious blasts of the last two weeks, I thought that I should lighten the mood and talk about humour in school, especially in the classroom.
From my experience, too many teachers see cheek and banter as a disrespectful attempt to undermine their authority, and sometimes it is, but often it's not.  Personal jibes should be dealt with, but I have derived huge amounts of pleasure from humour as a teacher.
When I started life as a teacher, in my early 20s, I discovered that within a short while, my nickname, bestowed by the pupils of course, was 'volcano'.  This upset me quite a bit, and gave me a message to calm down.  I found, over the course of my teaching life, that the more I relaxed, the better the lessons were and the better the communication between the pupils and me.  And humour became a useful tool for both learning and defusing tense situations.


Advice given in staffrooms at the beginning of the new school year, especially to new, young teachers, is often: "Don't smile until Christmas!"  Many teachers feel that if they drop their teacher's demeanour, or smile, or, heaven forbid, laugh, the students will lose all respect for them and then riot.
Such a notion is unfounded, in fact, the opposite is true.  The more you show yourself as a real, fallible person, the more respect you will get.  A recently retired teacher said:
"I never really showed myself to a class, fearful they would rebel.  Now that I know that they never would rebel, I am sorry I never showed them the real me".  Sad, but quite common.


I shall never forget the late Brian Glover, the actor, famous for his role as the sadistic sports' teacher in the film Kes, being interviewed on television many years ago.  He revealed that he had actually been a teacher, before he went into acting.  He reassured the audience that he was nothing like the character he portrayed so brilliantly in Kes.  The interviewer then asked if he missed teaching and he replied:
"Oh yes, heaps!  It was the best job in the world."
"Why?" asked the interviewer.
"Because it was so funny, often hilarious.  Kids are the best audience and the funniest people in the world". 
You can see why I remembered that interview.