Today’s Paffooney is a tribute to a childhood hero, Aquaman. I drew the picture from a comic book inspiration source coming from DC Comics in the 1960’s. Aquaman is a B-level superhero with not nearly so many fans as the big three, Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman. He was, however, my second favorite after Spiderman. He was more important to me than the Avengers. And this was strange, because I only had the chance to read the sacred comic books in the old barbershop in uptown Rowan. I only remember about two different issues that I was able to read during the long wait for a haircut. (Haircuts on Saturday took forever, because all the bald and crew-cut farmers would take forever getting their hair cut. And they hardly had any hair! I think the barber cut each hair individually.)
Aquaman and Aqualad would journey together in an incredible undersea world of sea monsters, giant fish, scuba divers, villains like Black Manta, and Mera, a real hot underwater babe. Topo the octopus could play comic relief by playing musical instruments or getting drunk on old lost kegs of pirate rum. I became a part of the adventure. I’m not sure whether I imagined myself more as Aquaman himself, or Aqualad. Aqualand was dressed all in red and blue, my favorite colors. I liked his blue swim-trunks. I myself could never wear swim trunks without a fatal case of embarrassment over my knobby knees and hairy legs. I admired Aqualad’s smooth and muscled boy-legs, though not without some shame and embarrassment. Some suggest that the relationship between Aquaman and Aqualad was a homo-erotic thing just like Batman and Robin. But, hey… NO IT WASN’T! It was a hero and sidekick that mirrored the complex relationship between a father and son. My father and I could never talk at any deeper level than Aquaman talked to Aqualad. Yet my father had super-powers for solving my problems and helping me do things and make things. Yes, I think I loved Aquaman because he reminded me of my own father in his quiet competence.
And I had a Captain Action Aquaman costume, a Christmas present and wonderful treasure. I played with it so much that only the broken trident, mask, and swim fins remain. The rest was all broken and unraveled and disintegrated from being played with. The Aquaman in my Captain Action collection has replacement parts in it to make it more complete. Yes, I spent time and money putting that toy back together so that I might play with it yet again.
So why is the super-powered King of the Sea so important to me? After all, his super powers are to breathe underwater and telepathically talk to fish. I think, reading back over this stupid little essay, that the most important theme is the father-son thing. I never owned a single Aquaman comic book as a kid, but I watched him on Saturday morning TV. He was one of the Superfriends. And my father had been in the Navy on Aircraft Carriers. Yes, Aquaman is my favorite because Aquaman is secretly my father.
Catch a Falling Star 
Why School Should Be Cool
I was a school teacher for thirty-one years, and in spite of the immense amount of brain damage that builds up over time, especially as a middle-school teacher, I think I know what we’ve been doing wrong.
We need to take a look at an education system where things are working better than they are here.
Now, I know you probably didn’t click on the boring video about school. Heck, you probably aren’t even reading this sentence. But I can summarize it and put it in easy-to-understand words. Finland does not have to educate as many poor and disadvantaged kids as this country does. The video gives five ways that Finland does it better, but all of them boil down to the basic notion that the country is more homogeneous and uniformly middle-class than ours is. Still, we can learn things from them.
The first of the five ways that Finland does it better is a difference in government. While U.S. governmental safety-net programs blame people who need food stamps for being lazy (even though some of them work 40-hour work weeks in minimum-wage jobs), Finland gives a huge package to parents of everything they might need as soon as their child is born. As long as the child is in school, the government does many things to support the family’s efforts to educate them. Imagine what we could accomplish here if we invested some of the vast fortune we give to corporations in subsidies into educating poor black and Hispanic children instead. Children have a hard time learning in school when they come to school hungry. If we could only feed them better, the way the Fins do, we would revolutionize our classrooms.
The second point the video makes is the biggest suds-maker every time I get on my teacher’s soap box. They don’t give kids homework and they only give them one standardized test when they leave high school. I have recently covered this topic more thoroughly in a post in which I was able to ridicule Florida governor Rick “Skeletor” Scott. (Boy, did I enjoy doing that.) But I won’t go into all of that again here.
The third thing is respecting teachers. In Finland they treat teachers with the kind of respect that they give to doctors and lawyers. How cool is that? In Texas, calling someone a teacher is an epithet. If a teacher is liked or even loved by their students, administrators are encouraged to keep a closer eye on them to figure out what’s wrong. Students are supposed to hate their teachers and sit all day filling out mind-numbing test-preparation worksheets. Imagine what it could be like if teachers weren’t the scum of the earth. They might actually have students convinced that learning goes on in their classrooms.
The fourth point is that Finland does not try to cram more and more memorized details into young brains so they can spit it all back out on a test. They take students thoroughly into the subject of study, and at a slower, easier pace. They dive deep into the river of learning instead of wade through the wide and shallow parts. All questions get answered. And by that, I mean, student questions, not teacher questions. The learning is student-centered.
Finally, the video states that Finland simply has fewer social ills in their country to get in the way of good quality education. But even though the work is harder in this country, the potential is really there to go far beyond what Finland is capable of. We have a natural resource that is totally untapped in this nation. We don’t develop the minds of a majority of our children in any meaningful way. And I can tell you from having done it, you can teach a poor or disadvantaged child to think. You can give them the tools for academic, economic, and personal success. You can make them into valuable human beings. But you should never forget, they are already precious beyond measure. We just ignore and trash that inherent value. So, the information is out there about how to do a better job of educating our children. We need to follow through.
Here endeth the lesson.
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