Do No Harm Part II: Avoid Irony

In Education, sometimes less is more I used to teach a course on Public Speaking. It took me three years to figure out how to properly organize and deliver the course. I think I finally did it right in the third year. The trick was to abandon my teacher ego (a subject for a future post), get out of the way, take care of administrative and secretarial necessities of the course, and allow the students to perform and to educate each other—as much as I could (which was never easy for me). A majority of the students who took this course were from the Faculty of Education and consequently destined for careers as educators. One message I passed on to all the students, especially those planning to become teachers: avoid irony. Every Joke has a victim This is very complicated advice because if you ask students to list the five features they appreciate in teachers, a “sense of humour” is bound to appear consistently in the list. (Here is another issue that I suspect teach