I have an AARP card, which means I’m officially banned from Snapchat, TikTok, and most other social media platforms.
The one exception is Facebook, which is where people my age go to confirm we’re still alive.
Fortunately, age discrimination doesn’t prevent me from using teaching methods that appeal to today’s students—or from maximizing instructional humor.
College students are elite media consumers. They live on a steady diet of short videos. Their attention isn’t broken; it’s optimized.
Students are intensely aware of time. Their mission is simple: watch as many videos as possible. That means anything longer than about ten minutes gets ignored.
Educators often complain about students’ short attention spans. But their viewing habits actually mirror what memory research has shown for decades:
People remember information better when it’s delivered in small chunks.
The same principle applies to humor.
Comedians rarely perform forty-minute jokes. They deliver humor in pieces—gags, bits, and punchlines. Humor gets diluted when buried inside long explanations.
Instructional humor works the same way.
A joke hidden inside a forty-five-minute lecture is like hiding chocolate chips inside a loaf of bread. Technically they’re there, but nobody notices.
There’s also a practical issue.
Students watch most instructional content on their phones.
Can you imagine holding a phone in front of your face for forty-five minutes to watch a lecture?
Neither can they.
This doesn’t mean serious ideas must be reduced to TikTok videos. Complex concepts still require explanation.
But long lectures can be divided into shorter, digestible modules.
My lecture videos average about ten minutes, and announcements or explanations are closer to five.
Students are far more likely to watch a reasonable-length video, retain the material, and appreciate the occasional piece of pedagogical humor.
In other words, if you want students to remember what you teach—and laugh along the way—
Think less like a lecturer…
…and a little more like a TikTok creator.
