Jong Song Dae, a lecturer at the Faculty of Social Sciences, has been enhancing cognition efficiency by telling funny and persuasive short stories at appropriate time in his lecture.
Witty humour that teaches you something meaningful along with laughter with great persuasive power has greater influence than any kind of wordy speeches or writings.
In psychology lectures that help students to do successful work with people on the basis of the scientific understanding of various psychological phenomena and laws formed among people, he applied humour effectively to enable them to understand what they learnt in a plain way and to raise their faculties of thinking and eloquence.
Firstly, he found as many short stories as possible helpful to develop students’ thinking and told them at appropriate time, thus raising the level of popularity. In other words, he found good examples relevant to the content of the lecture and applied them.
For instance, “Baby’s job” was told in the lecture on the process of formation and development of human psychology, and “Did the cocks celebrate the New Year’s Day in such cold weather?” in the lecture on a desire.
He also collected a lot of short stories for the development of thinking and set occasions for appropriate application.
For example, he chose “The latest tooth” and “An expert in poultry” for types of thinking, “Oral thanks” for reaction of feelings, “Repeated rudeness” for types of hobbies and tastes, and “Pride of a squad leader” for types of human relationship.
Secondly, he raised cognition efficiency by making students analyze stories by themselves.
For example, in order to help them to have an understanding on their own of the formation and development of psychology in the childhood, he started with telling “I need more fingers.”.
It goes as follows.
A mother was teaching arithmetic to her 5-year-old son.
Mother: How much is eight plus five?
Son: Mum, I need more fingers…
He let students analyze it in their own ways.
Their argument produced several analyses: the child was not able to count it because he had only 10 fingers, the child was unable to count it because he had not learnt to count numbers over 10, that is, he did not know that he could spread out his fingers for continuous counting after counting to 10, etc.
As a result, they could grasp the gist of the lecture easily which said that in the childhood thinking is restricted to those that have immediate relation to the objects they can perceive and imagine at the moment and that object motion-centred thinking develops into intuitive depictive thinking.
As mentioned above, the employment of humour made it easier and faster for students to understand what they learnt, and heightened the faculties for its practical application to the life.
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