An experience on teaching a drama class and staging performances with available resources is described. Some of the more challenging circumstances are highlighted and it is demonstrated that a sense of humor and community support is needed for the show to go on.

This article describes work undertaken with a class of Scottish Primary Six children (aged 10) that encouraged them to write humorous stories. It reflects on the impact of different teaching approaches, in particular exploring how teacher-led input combined with opportunities for peer talk might serve to influence children's writing. The aims were…

The Toulmin model of argument was introduced in 1958 by British philosopher Stephen Toulmin in "The Uses of Argument" and adapted by compositionists in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Consisting of six parts--claim, support, warrant, backing, rebuttal, and qualifiers--the model provides a means for composition students "to describe the process by…

The purpose of this study was to develop a laboratory analogue for the study of peer sexual harassment, and to examine person and situational factors associated with male on female peer sexual harassment. One hundred twenty-two male participants were given the opportunity to tell jokes to a female confederate from a joke list that included…

A professor of the old school invents the scenario of an avowed educational mediocrity that must defend its reputation for expecting the very least from its students and faculty. His fictional Damp State University cherishes its position on the lowest tier of "U.S. News & World Report's" rankings. Professor Reeves gives us a bitter…

For most teachers, more important than supplies and a spacious classroom is a happy learning environment in which each child feels welcome and safe. That is why it is so dismaying that according to one recent study, 43% of students worry about going to the restroom for fear of encountering a bully. The same study reported that a child is bullied…

Children attending early childhood education and care centres spend a lot of time fitting in with institutional routines. This paper uses ethnographic methods and sociocultural activity theory to describe and analyse the processes whereby young children in an early childhood centre collectively created meaning and interest during potentially…

Teachers and administrators are often directed to distance themselves from the children in their charge. Despite the land mines that accompany personal relationships with students, the authors argue that educators can still learn to build personal relationships with students. Personal-relationship building is one of the most important skills a…

This paper offers a humorous parable showing the trials and problems facing a chief lawyer for an institution of higher education. The lawyer, who happens to be a pit bull, faces such issues as deciding whether to take this new position at the university, his orientation to the university setting, his experience dealing with the workload and lack…

Virginia Woolf's "Orlando" is an excellent example of mock biography to use in literature classes concerned with analyzing literary genres. Woolf used humor to undermine some conventions of the genre of biography and to reform biography into a shape adequate to express the life of Vita Sackville-West. An ordinary biography most likely…

Anne Tyler's rare talent for combining comedy and pathos enables her to create characters whose pain is felt by the reader or student even as that same reader is led into laughter by the ludicrous situations in which Tyler places these characters. In her last three novels, "Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant,""The Accidental…

The American Indian appeared frequently in the almanac literature of 1783-1815 and was used as a source of humor, political comment, romanticism, etc, much of which contributed to the cultural conflict of the times. (JC)

A study investigated whether positive response to humor in a speech would enhance audience evaluation of the speech/speaker. A short informative speech on "listening" which included nine relevant jokes was audio tape-recorded in two versions, one in which each joke was punctuated by laughter, and one in which a stony silence greeted each…

The production and understanding of humor calls for a specific competence. It appears that second language learners fail to develop this competence even when they reach native-like proficiency levels. A review of the literature suggests that the notion of humor competence in second language learning has not been examined. Humor competence can be…

A total of 40 children in the three primary grades were studied to determine if they would donate more to a worthy cause after having been exposed to a humorous situation, in contrast to exposure to a serious one. The children who had heard a serious story about sharing donated slightly more to help Ethiopian refugees than did children who had…