Welcome to Wonderland (The Power of Holy Nonsense)

Yes, we have a pet rubber chicken!

His name? JumbleRumbleKins!

Reader of this article, my hope is that someday you may share in one of life’s most meaningful relationships. For to know JumbleRumbleKins (Jumble, for short) is to love him—and to love him is to belong to a family who shares in the utter hilarity of his squeaks and squawks.

Ha!

Seriously (or maybe not), to be present with young people in their play is one of life’s greatest joys—if we allow ourselves to experience it.

By temperament, I am a mostly serious person. But in my high school Spanish classroom, a different part of me emerges. I teach the language by repeatedly working selected high-frequency words and phrases into personalized and memorable stories.[1] Often, my students help to invent these stories and end up playing roles in them. At their best, the stories are amazingly ridiculous. What if the main characters in this story were a horde of miniature plastic babies? What if a hungry diner entered a restaurant looking to eat a penguin but found that they only served buffalo wings (By the way, do you know how many of those little wings a buffalo needs in order to fly?!). What if this same hungry diner ended up eating a live giraffe sandwich instead? And what if we acted the stories out, with props such as animal hats and plastic swords and any other objects in the classroom capable of being pressed into service on behalf of the story (including JumbleRumbleKins himself)? Over the years, there have been times when I have had to grab hold of a chair or my desk to keep from falling on the floor in laughter.

In her book The Power of Fun: How to Feel Alive Again, Catherine Price defines “true fun” as the confluence of playfulness, connection (with others), and flow.[2] As one teacher who recently observed my class noted, “The students were so caught up in the goofiness and silliness of telling and acting out stories—I don't think they realized that they were speaking and interacting in Spanish only for pretty much the whole period. Kevin tricked them. :-)” This sort of fun is more than just entertainment because it exists for the sake of learning rather than mere self-gratification. When the magic happens, Jon Eckert’s assessment rings true: “If you have experienced this kind of fun, you know that this is what makes teaching the greatest profession ever.”[3]

After we tell and retell a story, I give students a written quiz over its content and language structures. I instruct them that, once they finish, they are to draw on the back of their paper a selected character or event from the story. Not only does this provide a buffer for students who may need additional time, but it adds yet another layer of fun.

At the beginning of the school year, some students are hesitant to draw because they do not enjoy it or feel that their abilities measure up to those of others. I put everyone at ease, though, by joking that some of our class artists who are most skilled in things such as shading and proportion and perspective have yet to reach the pinnacle of artistic prowess—namely, to draw the perfect stick figure. And I make students comfortable by showing them—whenever I illustrate one of our stories on the whiteboard—the heights they need to climb to match those of their teacher. After all, not only am I a highly accomplished stick-figure artist, but I have always possessed the unique ability to make every animal I draw resemble a contorted duck.[4] Before long, nearly everyone is drawing on the back of their quizzes.

After I collect their quizzes, students immediately clamor for me to show their masterpieces to the rest of the class. If time is running short, I will show a select few. At other times, I will hold up nearly everyone’s work for the class to see. Importantly, the drawings I highlight differ in degree of technical skill. Some are masterfully drawn, and we “ooh” and “ah” over them. Some are highly imaginative, and we appreciate the creativity that went into them. And some of the very best—which I often declare to be my favorites because of how much they make me laugh—only marginally resemble the intended target—if at all! Afterwards, I will sometimes select my favorite drawing for the day—or conduct a spur-of-the-moment tournament-style vote—and give the victor a place of honor within a frame at the front of my room, where it will remain in all its glory until a future quiz comes along to take its place.

During all of this acting and drawing, what I want the students to sense is this: It is good to be us, with our limitations, imperfections, and quirks. Whether we are perfectionists who are learning to be content with what we can produce in a two-minute window or beginners who can barely draw a straight line, we experience our idiosyncrasies not as deficits, but as gifts. Instead of judgment, we experience grace in the presence of one another—and in the presence of God, who is with us and—dare I say it—who plays along with us.

Within Christian history, from ancient monastics to modern legalists, there has existed a temptation to privilege solemnity over joviality. And while it is true that humor can be used as an avoidance mechanism to keep from dealing with weighty matters, it is also true that mirth—indeed, even silliness, can be a holy thing.[5]

God is, after all, “the most joyous being in the universe.”[6]

So, instead of dismissing student silliness as frivolity, we ought to view it as participating in the goodness of God that courses through our world. With the right framing, nonsense is not nonsense, but an occasion for delight. An example par excellence of this is Lewis Carroll’s classic poem “Jabberwocky,” with its interplay of rhythm and sound.[7] In my Spanish class, when we learn grammar or memorize Scripture or tell stories, we will often voice the words in playful chants and songs. Since rhythm and sound are things that God has made, let us rejoice and be glad in them!

At their age, these students are (whether they know it or not) “trying on the faith.” And whether they retain it or adopt it in an increasingly secular and religiously diverse cultural milieu will largely depend, I believe, on whether they find it to be life-giving. This creates an imperative for us: Within their experience, Jesus and joy must co-exist. 

This does not mean that we must turn everything into a party. Hedonism would have us make an idol out of pleasure and run full tilt into sickness and enslavement pursuing it for its own sake.

An education that begins in the story and life of God, on the other hand, will bring greater joy in the long run, and our students will benefit immensely when we provide organic opportunities for connection and play within our schools and classrooms. Young people often have very little control of their lives, but instead are subject to the desires and actions of the adults around them. Too frequently, they experience anxiety, broken families, abuse and other forms of violence, depression, and a lack of esteem in the eyes of society. If we are to be conduits of God’s provision to them, we need to help them to see (and to feel in their bones!) that 1) this world is a good place to be and 2) it is good that they are in it.

When life is hard—as it often is—we ought not sugarcoat it. We can help them process the pain theologically as best we can and walk with them through it. But we must also help them see that God is no miser when it comes to bestowing gifts upon his creatures. With eyes to see, they can find His abundance cast across the universe and throughout their lives. And they can imagine that the sensory delight they take in the physical and visible world that God has created is an indication of the invisible-yet-no-less-real delight that He takes in that world—which includes them! Yes—God delights in them!

Indeed, God delights in us, too—a reminder that we may need. While many of us were drawn to the field of education because of the energy and imagination that children often display as they encounter the world, as we age it is possible to lose our own sense of wonder.

In his essay “On Three Ways of Writing for Children,” C.S. Lewis contends that if we are to continue to grow into and during adulthood, we should be less like trains, and more like trees. Instead of abandoning one station (of childhood delights) and moving on to the next one (of serious adult things), we should add new rings while still retaining the previous ones.[8] And though Lewis doesn’t draw attention to this in his analogy, I rather like the notion that the experiences that reside within our core are the wondrous ones of our early years.

When I interact with my students in class (and outside of it as well, as our interactions often carry beyond the walls of the classroom), the playfulness is not an act. In his book, The Four Loves, Lewis describes how we see more of our friends’ personalities in groups because each other member is uniquely able to elicit different facets of them.[9] It is like this with me—since no one would probably see this degree of playfulness if I did not allow and encourage the students to draw it out of me.

Maybe you are naturally a serious person. Maybe your faith communities have never majored in joy. Maybe you are tired after many years of teaching and have grown impatient or merely tolerant of the silliness of the young people around you. I hope that this article can help to renew your spirit.

Moving forward, try to get good sleep. Give thanks. Celebrate goodness. And enter even more deeply into that reciprocal relationship in which students help you to play as you help them to see that the source of joy is the Author of all life. It will be good for their souls, and for yours.

Besides, JumbleRumbleKins would be proud.

Squawk!

Footnotes:

[1] This instructional method—Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Storytelling—was developed in the 1990s by Blaine Ray and falls under the broader umbrella of comprehensible-input-based instructional methods.

[2] Catherine Price, The Power of Fun: How to Feel Alive Again, First Edition (The Dial Press, 2021), 32–33.

[3] Jonathan Eckert, Just Teaching: Feedback, Engagement, and Well-Being for Each Student (Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press, 2022), 44.

[4] My mother is a professional art teacher, and she would be proud to see that I have improved over the years. Now my drawings look like either a duck or a wildebeest.

[5] This is the claim of G.K. Chesterton, whose book Orthodoxy ends with a paragraph stating that “Joy, which was the small publicity of the pagan, was the gigantic secret of the Christian. . . . There was some one thing that was too great for God to show us when He walked upon the earth; and I have sometimes fancied that it was His mirth.

[6] Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life in God (San Francisco, CA: HarperSanFrancisco, 1998), 62.

[7] This poem can be found in Through the Looking-Glass, Carroll’s sequel to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

[8] C. S. Lewis, “On Three Ways of Writing for Children,” in Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2002), 25–26.

[9] C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves: An Exploration of the Nature of Love (Boston: Mariner Books, 2012), 61–62.