14.+Finding+Humor

At first, when I looked at the topic of this habit of mind, I thought "Oh how easy, I'll just write about how my friends and I have a good time in Chemistry class". However, a closer look at the rubric reveals that "Finding Humor" does indeed qualify as a habit of mind. The art of finding something funny relieves the burden of guilt, embarrassment, etc. etc. In this quarter, I found an applicable example of exactly how relieving finding humor is, in a relatively tense situation.

Me and Michael finding humor. Figure 14.

During our makeshift lab, where Michael, Eric and I had to test one of the four ways to increase the speed of a chemical reaction, we found ourselves in a patience-testing predicament. The reaction with the .5M concentration of HCl was taking a long, long time to react. After going for around 20 minutes, our group more or less burst into chuckles. We all knew how ridiculous the situation was, but until this point, had we not found humor about it, it would have been quite difficult to deal with. After we laughed it off, we decided to count the trial, which ended up taking more than 30 minutes. We vehemently decided against a repeated trial, instead opting to change the concentration to 1.5M, which took a significantly less amount of time. Altogether, I believe that through another experiment, I have improved my ability to find humor, and defuse a potentially detrimental situation.