Seriously?

One of the things that I think challenges my students is that I seem very serious one moment and I'm joking around the next, and they don't know what sort of behavior is expected. I actually think that my approach is completely consistent.

A number of years ago, a guy named Russell Baker had a column in the New York Times. Baker was a humorist, an observer, not extremely political but tuned in nonetheless. He was a big favorite of mine. One of my favorite columns of his was about what it meant to be serious. His point was that little kids are inherently serious. They say what they mean and mean what they say, and they take in the world without nuance. Some things are funny, some are not. Some are good and some are bad. It's uncomplicated. In other words, they take things seriously.

Baker suggests that when people go through adolescence, everything gets topsy-turvy and people feel very off-balance, and so they try to recapture the directness and seriousness that they once had but they fail. Instead of serious, they become solemn. These are two different things. You can be serious and still have fun, but there's no place for fun in being solemn. When you hear someone described as being no fun, you're calling them solemn.

I have a tendency to initially take everything seriously and at face value, but I see humor in all sorts of serious matters, and given that people sometimes laugh at my jokes, I'm guessing that others recognize it as well. The flip side of this is that I often take things seriously and laugh at them at the same time. I don't really think there's enough of that in the world. I take teaching math seriously, and I expect my students to take learning it seriously as well. But that doesn't mean it can't be fun.