Sarcasm

Zull’s chapter 9 entitled, “Waiting for Unity” was very interesting. I recently responded to a post by Baumgartner about what we have learned so far in this class concerning the physical mass that is the human brain and its anatomy. In chapter 9, Zull articulates it perfectly when talking about language.

“Language comprehension is a function of a region of the cortex that is just behind the auditory cortex in the back cortex.” (Zull 171).

Alan Alda as Capt. Benjamin Franklin "Hawkeye" Pierce on M*A*S*H

I had stated in my response that I was surprised to learn that everything in the human brain is interrelated and interconnected and how each part of the brain has some function on some level of importance. The above quote is from a section on language comprehension. It seems obvious that language comprehension would be related to and wrapped up in your auditory senses, being that language is an audible medium of communication. But I have never considered it like that before. It made me start to think about how my students were perceiving me and my lectures, lessons, my directions. I started to think about the words I used, the sentence structures, what emphasis on what syllables I employed. I have often been accused of sounding sarcastic. My fiancée will often ask me if everything is alright to which I will respond, “Sure, everything’s fine.” She almost always responds, “Tell your tone.” I suppose this is an issue of what Zull identifies as prosody (171). I know what I mean when I say I am fine but my fiancée gets an entire different meaning from the words based on my intonation.

I think intonation and inflection, prosody in general is very important when teaching. I have noticed while guiding instruction that certain of my students will not catch on to a quick quip I make or some other piece of humor I attempt. This is perhaps because my sense of humor (somewhat dry, I like to think I model myself on Hawkeye Pierce) is taken as seriousness by these students. I have often seen the look of confusion, sometimes bordering on anger that arises in certain of my students’ faces when I make some off-hand comment about an assignment being “due immediately,” when in fact I had stated earlier in the class that the assignment would be due on Friday. They just aren’t getting it. They take my serious tone to mean that I have adopted some authoritative air. But my kids are adaptable and after a few lessons with me, they learned my sense of humor, either through repetition or through study of my body language and could tell very quickly when I was “only kidding.”