What age did you stop dancing?
Was it when a kid made fun of you at school, and you vowed you would never be caught on their radar ever again? Was it when a significant other made an offhand comment about your moves that made you self-conscious enough that you lost your courage? Maybe you never stopped dancing – you are unafraid to shake it, no matter what others think! If that’s you, highest of fives – embrace that silly! But if you’re like a majority of adults, you carry a level of self-consciousness that gives you unease about being silly in front of other people. And that fear of being seen as “silly” is getting in the way of our learning experiences.
It’s an overdone practice at this point, but let’s dive in by looking at the definition of silly, as defined by Merriam Webster.
- Exhibiting or indicative of a lack of common sense or sound judgment
- Weak in intellect
- Playfully lighthearted and amusing
- Trifling, frivolous
When we’re dancing, singing, laughing so hard that we cry, we feel very much in definition number 3. Life is good. But when someone notices us singing or dancing, when they roll their eyes or utter one of those infuriating “Ooooookaaaaay…” type comments, we change, and we drop into definitions one and two. All of a sudden our silly doesn’t feel lighthearted – it feels dumb, foolish, and not at all worth anyone’s time.
Others’ opinions of us have a large influence on how we behave.
How does this affect learning? Well, let’s think about a time in our lives when we were completely unafraid to be silly – our lives as kids. When we were young, our focus was more on ourselves and the effect we were having on our environment, rather than how people felt about us. From a certain angle, the outside world didn’t even exist to us. We danced, we sang, we made funny faces, we yelled just for the sake of hearing ourselves yell.
We were also learning a ton. This is not a coincidence. Yes, our young brains were volcanic mires of neurons absorbing anything and everything around us, but we were also completely unafraid of making mistakes, and we were completely unafraid of looking silly. We didn’t learn to recite the alphabet – we learned to sing a song containing the alphabet. We didn’t just learn the names of our fingers, we held them behind our back and revealed them while singing a song about them meeting each other and running and hiding again. Everything we learned was tied into a song, a dance, a fingerplay. This isn’t because songs and rhymes are friendly to a child’s brain – it’s because songs and rhymes are friendly to ALL brains.
And at some point in our learning, the songs and rhymes stopped.
Part of that is because we started taking in more information in shorter amounts of time, to be sure, but somewhere along the way we collectively decided that songs and rhymes were for kids. It’s time to grow up, get serious, put your nose in the book, recite these facts. And I submit that our learning could greatly benefit from bringing some of that silly back.
As to the why, the reason, chiefly, is that silliness is memorable. When we smile and laugh, when we sing and make up rhymes, they create emotional resonance. When the emotional centers of our brain light up, our memory centers do, too. Activities and practices that make us FEEL things help us remember things!
Here’s an example:
In the sixth grade, our entire class memorized the first twenty elements of the periodic table by singing a song about them. I still remember it. If you meet me, feel free to ask me to sing it.
Want a longer example? I get it. How about this:
Some trainers and I were training on a piece of software, and a certain process required users to click a button labeled “Submit” at the end. The button was not obvious, and there was no prompt in the system to remind them. We drove the point home again and again in class, but it wasn’t until one of the trainers made up a rhyme that students really began remembering it. We taught the process and reminded them at the end, “It ain’t legit ’til you hit ‘Submit!'” By the end of the day, learners would be reciting it to each other as they practiced this process. Was it silly? One hundred percent. Did it help them remember? Absolutely. If we had been scared of making a fool of ourselves, this rhyme would never have happened. Being unafraid of looking silly helped us create a tool that helped our learners out.
When we get a little silly, we create memorable experiences. So dance a little, sing a little, make up a rhyme! The sillier the better. Let’s ditch the notion that silliness means we lack intellect, and embrace that “lighthearted and amusing” definition together!