day sixty six.

I apologize for being in my boxers in this comic.

day sixty five.

Not to cram it down anyone’s eyeballs, but DonorsChoose just did something really helpful for people like me who like to cart out their projects for folks by letting us pick a normal URL for our Giving Pages. Before I had to cut and paste a whole field of numbers and backslashes that I couldn’t commit to memory if I were some kind of genius.
I am not some kind of genius. If you want to check out my projects, here’s the easy-to-remember address:

http://www.donorschoose.org/chrispearce

…and I’ll add it as a link somewhere on the site this weekend (along with the long-promised list of comic sites) so I can stop with these incessant reminders.

day sixty four.

…uh, that’s a sow’s ear I’m holding in the first panel, in case my great artwork has blinded you momentarily. Yep. It sure is.

day sixty three.

If you have a chance, please check out my DonorsChoose projects! Donations are greatly appreciated, and one project is only about $100 dollars away from completion!

chalkboard drawing photo post!

It won’t be reflected in the comic for a week or two, but we’re done with Animal Farm and moving on to “Romeo & Juliet” as of this past week.

I don’t like to be crass, but COME ON! The first scene in “Romeo & Juliet” is unbelievably packed with bawdy jokes and, of course, the immortal “bite my thumb at them” exchange. It’s such an amazingly vulgar hook for the kids that I always use it on the first day of reading.

Something I drew wrote five seconds before everyone came in on the day I teach blank verse. Let me just say, I am aware that if you parse out the first line, it’s one syllable long. Was I aware of it when I wrote it on the board? Heck no. I just kind of taught around it.

day sixty two and a half.

I struggled a lot with yesterday’s comic. The aim was to draw something about the idea that when you correct a scantron test, it’s immediately obvious how your kids did on the test by the loud noise the machine makes as it corrects their marks.

Sometimes you slide a test through the machine and you hear one click and you think “Awesome! Johnny did a good job on this week’s vocabulary test!” Other times you send it through and it sounds like yesterday’s strip.

Yesterday’s comic focused on the negative a little too much and it bugged me until I remembered this morning that I actually DID a scantron comic about four or five years back. While I had completely forgotten about it when I drew the more recent of the two strips, you can see I lifted aspects of the old strip whole cloth for the new one.

I feel like this is a better representation of what I was trying to communicate with yesterday’s strip, so I thought I’d post this one here for comparison. I think it’s interesting (and sort of sad) that I did a better comic about teaching when I was substituting back in 2004 than I did in 2010 as a teacher with five years experience.

day sixty two.

Just to be clear, scantrons are FINE for taking a quick pulse of the class… but they’re better used in say, a math class.

day sixty one.

I’m going to write more about them this weekend, but on the chance that anyone’s interested in checking them out, I have two brand new DonorsChoose projects available and ready for donations, as well as one that is only about $100 dollars away from being fully funded!

day sixty.

I can’t help but point out that today is the sixtieth teaching comic. My original plan was to do somewhere in the neighborhood of 180 teaching comics, representative of an entire year’s worth of teaching. Truth be told, I have somewhere around 70 comics drawn, with several held back due to my “4 a week” posting schedule. Still, it’s a nice milestone for me, personally.

chalkboard drawing post!

As of the past week, we began our six week unit on Romeo & Juliet!

Yes, that’s the flux capacitor down there. I was SO proud of the dozen or so students who CLEARLY recognized it.

Yes, I know that William Shakespeare sucks.

I really liked this last one. In case you were wondering, I didn’t tie my AIMs in with the Benchmarks and Standards this week. My bad.