Teacher Comics: You take the test, you pass the test

My favorite moment of the entire week. I’ve never seen anyone so excited to know what second person point of view was in my life!

Teacher Comics: Geez

I hope this doesn’t come off as complaining as schools have been given a really bad hand here when it comes to administering this test. As far as I’m concerned, my school does a damn fine job of figuring out to give this test to hundreds of sophomores while still attending the needs of the rest of our student body.

If I were to play pretend I was the guy in charge, here’s what I would do: I would stagger these tests so that there wasn’t a five exam marathon pileup in the middle of March. That’s not good for anybody. I’d give each exam its own day, maybe one exam every other week for… 10 weeks, let’s say. March through April. That would give students space enough to prepare a bit. Schedule those testing days on a Friday and give all the students NOT taking this test the day off. Get them out of the building and allow administration and proctors to focus on the task at hand. The students taking the test would get a half-day; when they’re done with the test, they can go home.

Even in writing this I know why it wouldn’t work… bussing would be expensive, the scheduling of days off and half days would put a strain on budgets, grading the exams takes time, and a dozen other reasons that have nothing to do with giving students the optimum opportunities to do well on these exams.

Oh well, what do I know. I’m just a teacher with ten years of experience…

Teacher Comics: Oh Gee Tee

“This week” is code for “last week,” which is when the majority of these comics were drawn. They were drawn, in fact, DURING the OGT testing time, for which I was a proctor along with another teacher. Two teachers, 17 students and ABSOLUTELY NO use of electronic devices equalled a lot of productivity for me, sketchbook wise!

odds and ends

Well, I’m coming off a very light week, work wise. As anyone involved in teaching at the high school level in Ohio knows (there’s a narrow demographic for ya!), this past week we administered the Ohio Graduation Test to our sophomores. Five grueling days of standardized tests where, by the end of the week, most students’ brains are toast.

Administration of the OGT presents a real problem when it comes to having regular classes; since it takes about two hours to give students the test, we run on a two-hour delay schedule during the OGTs. Most of my students, I saw for a grand total of two hours and twenty minutes over these past five days. Not an ideal way to run a classroom. I was lucky enough to have the computer lab signed out for Thursday and Friday, but the first three days of the school week were a total wash.

…maybe not a total wash, since I personally got a lot of grading done. I also got a head of my self-imposed comic deadlines. Those are both good things. All things considered however, I’m looking forward to getting back into the swing of things next week.

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I suppose this would be the place to mention: I am not a huge fan of Monday and Wednesday’s comics this week. Monday’s comic MIGHT have worked if I had posted it last week… but here? It just seemed disconnected and weird to me. Wednesday’s comic is a classic example of “show, don’t tell.” If I had just posted Tuesday and Thursday’s comic, I think those two comics would have made for a stronger connection to the start of our investigative journalism project than the four comics together did.

Sometimes explaining things is necessary. Next week, I’ve got a comic where, for all intents and purposes, I’m just laying out what exactly I’m asking my students to do in their investigative journalism project. Monday and Wednesday’s comics were NOT a necessary case of this.

I don’t know if this is an apology or just a tacit recognition of the problem… but there it is. Hey, at least I’m thinking about my craft a little bit.

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Continuing to get around to the 2011 Academy Award nominated movies, Ellen and I watched The Help this weekend.

Ellen read and enjoyed the book, so she was looking forward to the flick. For myself, my only exposure to The Help previous to last night was through the millions of incessant commercials for the flick. You no doubt remember them; they all used that awful Cobie Caillat song where they kept hitting the refrain over and over? Either you know EXACTLY what I’m talking about and you now have the song stuck in your head… or you’re one of the lucky few who hasn’t been exposed yet.

ANYWAY… The Help. I thought it was… okay. There were definitely some good performances; Viola Davis certainly deserved her nomination, although I do see why her restraint with her character might have hindered her from a win. It wasn’t as flashy and crowd-pleasing a role as Octavia Spencer‘s sassy maid. Beyond those two performances, I thought the movie had severe problems. In particular, the villain of The Help, Bryce Dallas Howard‘s vile Hilly Holbrook, had no depth and was therefore nothing much more than a shrill harpy. It got to the point late in the flick where it seemed the moviemakers decided to make Hilly as unappealing as possible by slapping a cold sore on her lips. There was no context for the choice, nor was its’ new presence ever really addressed. That bugged me for some reason.

I suppose the movie has an uplifting message, but it wasn’t anything I hadn’t seen before and I don’t really recommend it.

2010-2011 school year: day eighty one

I don’t know if this comic’s a success or not… but it’s true.

2010-2011 school year: day twenty five

Today’s comic mirrors a previous comic. Go back into the vast archives and see if you can figure out which strip I ripped off!

2010-2011 school year: day twenty four

I took a long time to question whether or not I wanted to include this case of mismanagement in the comic strip. I definitely didn’t treasure the prospect of having to draw another couple of days filled with students taking tests; that wasn’t altogether interesting to me. I went ahead and decided to use this because it did end up becoming rather a large part of my classes at the beginning of the year. I think it goes without saying that this is but one piece of a much larger puzzle that I’ll be sifting through as the year goes by… hopefully it doesn’t come off as overly negative!

2010-2011 school year: day sixteen

 

This just showed up in my mailbox: A Harris Poll says that graphic novels are more popular now than both Westerns and chick-lit. Cool!

2010-2011 school year: day fifteen

I don’t know whether this is oversharing or not, but I wanted to have it on the record somewhere that getting away from elaborate backgrounds (or as elaborate as my pen scratching can be) is a conscious choice. I’ve been looking at a lot of my favorite newspaper comic strips in the past two months and one thing I’ve noticed about them is their judicious use of background elements.

Part of this is function over form: newspaper comics get shrunk down to the size of postage stamps, so you don’t want a lot of noise in the background that takes away from the action of your characters… but I also think, in certain cases, it brings a certain elegance and focus to the ideas of a comic strip.

My reason for saying this is that I struggled with the first panel of this strip, and I guess I feel better pointing it out myself.

2010-2011 school year: day four

The first week’s batch of comics has become more interesting to me in the light of some discussions going on in my school on the idea of “toxic culture.” Toxic culture is a hell of a term to throw around, but  after reading on it a little bit, I was pleased to look at these first few strips and see evidence that I’m working to keep the toxicity out of my classroom, even though these were drawn weeks before the topic came up for general discussion in our faculty meetings.