CSotD: Introducing a new strip and then going full rant
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Let's start in Denmark today. Well, in Scotland. But with a Danish story.
Here's one of HJ Ford's illustrations from Andrew Lang's 1894 retelling of Hans Christian Andersen's "Thumbelina," from "The Yellow Fairy Book":
And now we'll go to Denmark.
Or, the US. But it's imported:
And that's Wumo, a newly syndicated strip that Michael Cavna writes about here, but that I couldn't find on the syndicate site, but rather found (and bookmarked) here. Today's Danish theme is purely coincidental, but the creators are, indeed, Danish.
And funny. This one was designated their best of the month:
I probably liked it in part because I wrote about Asperger's and such things just a few days ago, and then spent the past three days at the New York Reading Association's annual convention where such things were very much on the agenda.
This, by the way, is a good, non-exploitive use of autism in cartooning. As they say, it's funny because it's true. Had dinner with a teacher who was telling me about a kid in his fifth-grade class who is a large challenge because of his Aspergers/autism/whatever, but everything he said about the kid was extremely affectionate. It's the kind of challenge good teachers embrace.
However (cue the rant) today's Calvin & Hobbes rerun is a reversal of the Woody Allen line about tragedy repeating as comedy. I guess this was funny when it ran, and it's still funny, but the joke has taken on a pall of gallows humor in the years since:
I've said for years that the reason school budgets are so contentious is that — outside of New England town meetings — it's the only time people get to vote on a budget directly. So all the pent-up hostility towards government spending gets dumped on the schools for lack of other targets.
I've also said that, while nobody thinks eating in a restaurant qualifies them to be a chef, they all seem to think that having been a student makes you an expert on teaching.
Those two factors have coalesced into "educational reform" in which people with no goddam idea in the world of how teaching works have become empowered to micromanage teachers, and I don't just mean Homer and the gang down at Mo's Tavern.
I was saying 20 years ago that there are too many people in suits who think that, because they went to college and learned to parse Shakespeare, that's what being educated means and it's the only thing being educated means.
And I've also said that, if my car breaks down on a rural road late at night, I don't want the person who stops to be (former New York State Commissioner of Education) Richard Mills.
I said it even before Dave Coverly drew this Speed Bump in 2008, but I sure laughed and grabbed it when it ran back then.
What was once a bureaucratic annoyance to be sidestepped has become a politically powerful bludgeon. School reform is all the rage and, in New York at least, it is moving like an avalanche through our schools. There is no sidestepping it anymore.
Not only are we shoehorning kids into academic programs they don't want rather than working to improve education in the areas where they are motivated and where their talents can be best developed, but now the oversight of teachers has become so invasive and inappropriate that morale in the profession is, justifiably, in the toilet.
We've all heard about kids spending time practicing for tests instead of learning, and teachers resent the loss of teaching-time being devoted to that.
But New York has gone beyond bubble-sheet obsession and now is monitoring, assessing, observing and interfering with teachers through insanely Byzantine evaluation systems that involve nine hours of taping of your own lessons and detailed self-critiques and documentation and analysis of all lesson plans and and and.
The Pointy Haired Boss is funny in Dilbert but he's screwing up schools.
The diners are writing the recipes and then yelling for the cook to be fired when it doesn't come out right.
So, yeah, it was three days of spending time with people who love kids and love to teach and are so discouraged that it felt like a month of sympathizing and strategizing and being so very, very glad I never finished that masters in teaching.
Sigh.
Let's brighten it up a little here with an earworm:
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