Human Cannonballs, Trapeze Artists, and Evil Geniuses: Using Humor to Engage College Algebra Students

Many students dread the thought of taking an online math class. Discussions are particularly stressful with students often reporting that they don’t know math well enough to write about it. Students also need to feel they are in a safe learning environment in order to do their best work. To address these issues, several College Algebra discussion questions were written with a humorous edge. During this session, humorous and non-humorous discussion questions will be compared, examples of student responses to humorous discussion questions will be shared and best practices for writing humorous discussion questions will be discussed.