So, here’s a picture of Michael Mouse surrounded by friends and admirers of all sorts. I can’t help the surrealism any more than Salvador Dali could, but the point here is that I, like Mr. Mouse, am a Mickey. I am filled with Mickey-ness. I am a part of all of Mickey-dom… but never Mickey-dumb! “Sweet Mickey, warm Mickey, little ball of yucks… Cool Mickey, wry Mickey, nyuk, nyuk, nyuk.”
I have found to my chagrin that I have a monkey on my back, a happy monkey, but a monkey never-the-less. This little creature is a serious need for the morning caffeine fix, an addiction to Diet Coke. I discovered the problem as a substitute teacher eight years ago when I was supposed to take on 8th grade English classes at Perry Middle School. I had been there before, and I knew what to expect from these kids. They are vicious little substitute teacher eaters. That is why there are so many bones on the floor of that middle school. Only really tough teachers and subs survive there.
Now, I once had doubts about how tough I am as a disciplinarian. I used to like kids too much to make some of the hardest choices. If you like a kid, it is hard to send him or her to a detention center or alternative school. You hate to set their little feet on a path that we teachers always say leads to prisons, gangs, and poverty. But as a sub, I didn’t get to really know and care about them. You learn to get them before they get you. I enjoyed killing off a few of the worst sub-killers. By becoming a tough, mean sub, I had developed the power to get through the day without real challenges to my authority, personal integrity, family history, and anything else that middle schoolers will try to undercut. That tough demeanor, though, is 90 per cent Coca Cola boost. I am in the habit of buying a Diet Coke in the teacher’s lounge before the start of classes. I have never learned to drink coffee. I can’t drink coffee and come away with the feeling I need to be singing “I believe I can fly…I believe I can touch the sky…” like Dilbert has been doing in the comic strips lately.
Well, you can probably see it coming. That morning the Magic Go Juice was sold out. Cheap gol’ dang schools let that happen way too much! Forget the better health care for teachers, the Govenor needs to promise that the Coke machines will never run dry. I had to face the monkies and the monsters with no spiritual armor from the little red can, actually silver can because as a diabetic, I can only drink things that are un-sugarfied. It was a formula for pure disaster that I had faced far too often in the employ of the Wicked Witch of Creek Valley, the principal who changed me from a teacher into a substitute teacher. Oh well, you turn extra mean as you get old. Frowns enhanced by wrinkles are much scarier than any I used to have. I gave the “Killer Eye of Painful Death Lurking” better than any other substitute teacher, thanks to loads of practice, and my Popeye-like squinky eye left over from an old football injury. I made it through the day without my Diet Coke. Does that mean I should give it up? Horrors! I am swilling a Diet Coke right now and trembling at the mere thought. No withdrawal and delerium tremens for this old Coke addict. I have chosen my poison and now will live with it.
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All you people who’ve never set foot in a classroom where someone has announced to the world that you are a teacher, especially a middle school classroom, have absolutely no idea what teaching really is like. Even some of you who are teachers and sincerely believe that you control behavior in a classroom, especially a middle school classroom, are amazingly deluded.
For example, take the pictures we normally look at and think, “Oh yes, that is what a classroom looks like.” A picture like this;
This is, of course, total fiction. These kiddos were bribed to raise their hand for the picture. There is no question in the brain of any teacher anywhere in the world that can make all of these kids raise their hands at once. Even if you say, “Who wants chocolate?” some of the students will not raise their hands because they will think, “I have to do something to earn the chocolate, and if I have to do something, it probably involves thinking, and thinking is the last thing that they can trick me into doing.” Of course, if you ask, “Who thinks I’m the worst teacher you ever had?” then only the kid who expects to get a perfect grade and is not willing to put that at risk will not raise a hand. When you ask a question in a classroom, you are more likely to get no hands raised at all. Teacher supervisors and principals always say that you have to give them enough “think-time”, but whatever that is, it is not something that students actually do.
Another thing that people don’t generally realize is demonstrated in this next picture. But look at it very carefully;
This is total fiction. You can’t teach from technology. First of all, nothing ever works. You have to spend all your class time debugging crashed systems, re-connecting to the internet, and monitoring student’s screens. You can’t teach them anything. The boys will be secretly downloading porn and the girls will all be sneaking One Direction’s songs onto the task bar. Learning only happens on the internet independently of the teacher. It is not something you can either plan or control. Teaching really only happens with a teacher talking and kids being allowed to respond… call the teacher names… reveal how to say bad words in Spanish and other languages… discuss sex and video games… you know, actual learning.
The last reveal for today is a truth concealed in a lie. Administrators always say, “We’re in it for the kids,” which typically means we are doing it for the money and don’t give the administrator a hard time about any difficult or impossible thing they expect us to do in the classroom. But this lie is ironically true. If you are a real teacher, you have to care about individual kids. You have to let them use you and abuse you, talk about themselves, and minimize the amount of time they actually have to listen to you as you ultimately solve their impossible, life-threatening problems.
So, there you have it… secrets learned from thirty-one years of teaching revealed for free. But believe me, I do have a book in mind.
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Today I bought a new book. It is called The Art of Joe Kubert, edited by Bill Schelly. I got it at Halfprice Books for a mere six dollars and ninety-nine cents. It is filled with treasure. From the 1950’s to the present day, Kubert has been an artist behind Hawkman, Tarzan, and Sargent Rock. He is fantasy and surrealism at its graphic best. I plan on pouring over it all summer long.
Life is like Moose Bowling,
Because…
In order to knock over all the pins,
And win…
You have to learn HOW TO THROW A MOOSE!
My homage to “the Ghost Who Walks” was carefully chosen. I scanned my Phantom comics from Charleton looking for the right pose. I found an image of him punching toward the viewer. I thought, “Why don’t I put that view on horseback and have him riding toward me and punching.” Why did I think that? Who knows? As an artist, I’m kinda erratic and crazy that way. I guess that’s why I claim to be a surrealist. I do believe all comic book artists have to be surrealists to do their job. That’s true whether they do super heroes, ducks who hoard money in vaults and wear spats, pigs who wear a coat and a tie but no pants, or alien monsters hungry for the nearly naked flesh of Dale Arden. Uh… maybe I’m revealing way too much about my thought processes here… So here’s step one, the pen and ink.
Then I had to give it some colored pencil treatments. Black and white with crosshatching is cool, but it is also like bare bones, without life and energy. So I used the powers I have over cheap Roseart pencils and madly scribbled in colors carefully balanced to show just how truly chaotic my perceptions of action and adventure really are.
Now, I know the Phantom’s horse is either black or pure white, depending on which version or generation of the Ghost Who Walks is being depicted, but I did a yellow horse. I know… I know… I did pansy colors when I really should’ve gone fire red or all bloody crimson. I’m completely violating continuity. But I never completely do what I intend to do. If I don’t screw it up at least a little bit, then it really isn’t me. Besides, what else is there to yell at myself about and twist words around to make it sound like I’m being all comedically gifted and funny?
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One of my all-time favorite comic book characters has always been Captain America as a member of the Avengers. Just like so many other artists hooked on comic books, I have drawn my heroes numerous times. Here is a sample. This is mostly a pen and ink drawing, colored with colored pencils.
The Dust Man is unique because he creates worlds from chalk dust. He draws pictures on the chalk board in colored chalks, sometimes massive full-board murals. He is a natural at telling stories, whether they are pieces of great literature read aloud (he used to do Rikki Tikki Tavi by Rudyard Kipling, A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, Joey Pigza Loses Control by Jack Gantos, and The Reptile Room by Lemony Snicket), or they were incidental slice-of-life stories about his own experiences, or even re-tellings of historical figures and the events in their lives (one student used to sum up all of these stories by saying “first you tell us what wonderful things he or she did, then you tell us how that person died a horrible or painful death”… and I often found humor in that). The Dust Man was a natural teacher of boys, able to connect their silly and hormonal little lives to a great wide world of significant experiences. He could teach girls too, even though he found them much harder to understand. But now, in 2014, he will lay the chalk down for a final time. The dust will race across the blackboard no more. The stories will go from oral to written form. And something will be, regrettably, forever lost. (And, yes, pathos is humor too, a fond but bittersweet memory… so I did not miss-tag this post!)
Although the child in the painting is definitely not me or one of mine (the dog is Queenie, and she was real), and although I grew up about as far from the sea as you can get, this painting reveals something critical about who I am. My Grandpa Aldrich was a singular man of wisdom and good humor. He could tell a funny story with the best of them. He was a farmer and inculcated in me a farmer’s work ethic, that get-up-before-dawn style of thing. He never got mad, even the time I broke the plumbing in his house by playing Tarzan in the basement, swinging on the bathroom pipes in the ceiling. Everything I know about how to love, and how to act, and who to be I got from him, or at least from him through my mother who was his child. My grandpa lasted into his eighties and was alive until I finally got married at 38. He lives in my heart still, guiding my actions… even the words I am writing now.
Catch a Falling Star 