i feel like a real idiot for not mentioning this before.

It’s probably something of a shock for a reader these comic strips to think I’m completely abusing my position as an educator to draw some stupid cartoons. I want to take a second and go into the actual “nuts and bolts” of my approach to drawing this thing and how it squares with my responsibility to the school where I work and most importantly, my students.

First of all please know every single student that appears in this comic is a composite. I realize simply by virtue of there being images to go along with words, concern for the identities of my students would be natural… but know this: I don’t do likenesses, I don’t do caricatures. I work hard to make sure that a even a person with working knowledge of my classroom would be hard-pressed to identify anyone by what they see in this comic strip. Besides likenesses not entering into the comic’s purview, no real names are used in the comic either.

In essence, I try to jumble up as many details as possible while keeping as true to the spirit of whatever I’m trying to convey in the strip. There are plenty of great teacher blogs out there where teachers do a similar thing- they’ll assign a “codename” to a student and stay as general as possible with details in order to address a concern or discuss an idea. I like to think that’s basically what I’m doing here, only with my severely limited artistic capacities.

Secondly, before I do a strip about something that happened in class, I get permission from the students involved, regardless of the fact that a random reader wouldn’t be able to know they are the people involved in the strip. Only when I get the OK from the student do I start to put the strip together. Quite honestly, most kids are completely keen on my mining the class for comic strips, and they ask to be included constantly. Even the comics I’ve drawn featuring students who were not at their best… after the fact, I might talk to the kid and find that they’re really into being portrayed in the comic.

Obviously that’s not the case for every strip this year- I can think of one off the top of my head where I didn’t discuss the strip with a student and I’ll be frank with you; I got some e-mail about it. The reason I felt alright about doing that strip is two-fold. One, the incident was years old- I decided to try and include it because I felt it reflected on some other things that were going on in my classroom… but honestly, the whole thing happened in 2006. Two, I fudged the facts quite a bit in the telling of the story… like I said, I felt I remained true to the the theme, which was my frustration at the process of dealing with an unruly student, but almost everything else was changed from “true” life.

All those precautions are truly not enough make me feel comfortable; I take my job very seriously and I  always hope others will as well. Keeping that in mind, at the beginning of the year I talk about the comic with my classes. I show them examples of strips I’ve drawn previously, from comics I did when I was their age up through things I worked on last week. I discuss my ongoing project with my students… and I give them a permission slip. The permission slip states that the student would like to be a part of the comic and that they understand everything else I’ve already outlined in this here journal entry. The permission slip needs to be signed by me, the student, and the student’s parent or guardian. If I don’t get a permission slip, the student is off limits. I’ve had kids who I’d really like to involve in the comic but could not because they opted not to get the permission slip signed.

If I ever end up drawing something that doesn’t jibe with any of the above with in any way… I junk it (some might argue that’s what I should do with all of these comic strips, but I digress). There have been several strips this year that didn’t make the cut and are lining a landfill somewhere.

…anyway, maybe I’m fooling myself thinking that this has crossed anyone’s mind but it’s something I wanted to get on the record. Again I take my responsibility to my students very seriously and I’d hate for anyone to think otherwise.

(I should also mention that I’m gigantically fat and ugly and I myself do not look anything like the little comic version I draw, but maybe I’ll dig more into that quagmire some other day.)