Crack Another Yolk

Every week, for every grade I teach, I give out a list of vocabulary words for the students to learn. They are given the definitions, but I explain the words in class so they understand them. Then they get a quiz.

This week, my sixth graders had been particularly angellic and intellectually curious, so I decided to reward them by putting the word "pun" in their vocab. I figured that when it came time to explain "pun" I would have to give them a few examples, and that this would at least be more fun for them than the usual word explanations. It was.


Fat Joe

I started with an example on the board:

"Look at the ocean."
"Yes, I sea."

I know. I know. But listen: these kids are like ten. When we were that age, we thought Robin Williams was funny. And Robin Williams is, it turns out, less funny than -- I swear to God I believe this -- terminal illness.

Anyway, their faces lit up. They were beaming. It was as if I had unlocked for them an entire world of unfunny jokes, except that they found these unfunny jokes incredibly funny. They told me to do another, and since I was feeling good about myself after having mystified a bunch of 10-year-olds with my wit, I was glad to:

[Man No. 2 is fetching water from the well]

Man No. 1: "How are you?"
Man No. 2: "I'm doing well."

Again, smiles. As they began trying to come up with their own, I said that the easiest way to do this would be to think of either (1) a word that has two meanings (can/can) or (2) two separate words with different meanings that sound the same (see/sea). And then from there, to try and think of a scenario in which the two words or two separate uses might both make at least some sense. They were pretty bad at it.

That is, until a boy named Khalid raised his hand. "Oh, I have one!" To this point, his classmates were like 0 for 58 in trying to come up with puns, throwing together words like "tape" (sticky) and "tape" (video) but not using them in scenarios where mention of either word made any sense. Khalid's wasn't perfect, either, but check it out: He set a scene in which a boy was asking a man (a doctor I think) if he could grow scales, like a snake. And the man, presumably weighing the boy, replied, "No, but the scale says you have grown." Now, his delivery, if I recall, was even less joke-like than that, but still . . . when a 10-year-old, second-language English student makes a connection between growing scales and a scale measuring growth . . . well, you realize you're looking at a kid who's going to be much smarter than you when he grows up.

You hope, anyway.