The Day Laughter Became the Best Teacher: My Experience at Global English Camp

Program Experiences - Cayla Okafor

I didn’t need an alarm to wake up on time on July 18, 2025. Anxiety caused my eyes to flutter open several hours before they needed to that day.

I woke up with anticipation building in my heart and spilling out through my actions. From seven to nine am, I tried to swallow the rock lodged in my throat. I put my hand on my own leg to stop it from its own continuous tremble. I might’ve even asked my co-coach ten times if she was nervous, hoping that her response would find a new way to calm my own anxieties. Little did I know, the very thing causing my nerves would be the antidote. 

Three boys sitting in a line on the top floor of the Shinjuku venture turned their heads as my co-coach and I approached the table. Their smiles met mine, and my nerves started to melt, dripping down from my chest and pooling around my chair as soon as I sat down.

I think most people can go their whole lives without fully realizing the power of humor. Before this experience, I had not seen its true impact. Humor transcends culture, bringing people of different backgrounds together to share something that is special and unique. It’s hard to be anxious when you’re laughing, and I laughed with my students everyday in the Shinjuku building. With the way the program was organized, this feat was easy. 

The first two days of the program are spent breaking down the barriers that naturally occur when meeting someone for the first time. From ‘two truths and lie’ and ‘splat’ to to konbini runs – where we debated whether kinokonoyama was the supreme chocolate treat— the students’ walls of unfamiliarity began to crumble. On Day three, a sense of comfortability is established, one that was built through laughter and conversations, and it is about to deepen. 

Day three is a widely loved day, the day where we laugh the hardest, where jokes are flying around the room so fast to the point where it’s hard to catch your breath. It is skit day. In the morning, teachers help their students prepare a short play for the class; it can be about a folktale, a commercial, or a general lesson that they want to relay to the public. Regardless of the prompt they choose, the students have complete creative freedom to take the act where they want it to go. Making something that is funny and creative in a new language is far from easy, but this is what makes it extremely rewarding. In my experience, the process of crafting the skit is the best. When the students are brainstorming and joking with one another while asking the teacher whether they can stand in as a side character (I was asked if I wanted to be the peach in Momotaro several times), the air feels light. So light that one forgets that they are in an organized classroom, all they are experiencing is simply a blithe, fruitful conversation. 

The end of the day comes before you know it and that means it is time for the performances to occur. Nerves once again build in the students, and the teachers try to ease them through breathing exercises. However, after the first minute of the first performance where the class bursts out laughing at some absurd, but clever retort, the jitters tend to fade. Watching your students release their inhibitions on stage, let down their guard and have fun, is a moment that stays with you.

Skit day is just one of the many moments created to make the students smile. Staff held surprise runway shows, kahoot games, UNO marathons, and Hollywood competitions in order to create a sense of excitement. 

In this program, the students have five days to improve their English skills, five days immersed in an unfamiliar environment with unfamiliar faces, unsure of what is to occur. The least that the teachers can do is make them smile while they’re here. Laughing is often seen as a distraction, a way to deter someone from an academic goal. But the truth is that it is an essential part of learning. Anxiety can impede someone from truly understanding, how can one digest material when they never feel at ease? 

A laugh from my student is priceless; it means something is going well, that they are growing, and I know that Global English Camp will be filled with many more laughs in the future.