Finding the Humor in it All...(Math 1512--Week 5)

My online class continues to focus on geometry for this week. Again, I have flashbacks of my elementary math education and question, why do I need to learn this? Now, I have an answer, I need to learn this so I can teach children how to learn it. A key approach to teaching young students is to have a sense of humor. For my math class, I have to create cartoons that include math content. How can math be funny? This is something I had to ask myself.

I'm not laughing about it. It has been an intense semester so far--and I like math! I've been worrying about not being able to help a student. What will I do if my student just doesn't understand what I am trying to teach them? How can I make a joke out of something so black and white? And not only do I have to make a joke out of it, it has to be appropriate to use in the classroom. Here's one of the cartoons I came up with:

I was thinking about how students can say the most shocking things! I created this cartoon to introduce variables. Variables aren't as intimidating if students know the values. In this case, the students know the variables are their ages. This cartoon, the student uses his teacher's age as the variable and implies that his teacher is five times his and his classmate's age. I tried to capture one of those moments when kids say something that you least expect! I guess even among all the chaos of classwork, I can find the humor in it all...I will HAVE to find the humor in it all if I want to be a good teacher.