Vaccinations against Covid-19 have picked up, infections were down then plateaued, and now have risen a tad but the outlook is far more positive than it was in January. So this monthly feature of cartoons will look at life during Covid. It will be the last set of stabs at humor about the year of the plague and the gradual resumption of “normal” activities. Enjoy!
I need some advice today. I made a bad decision to get a tattoo when I lived in Houston back in 1999. How much would it cost to get my large @walmart tattoo removed?
For this month, I gathered cartoons and posters about teaching during the pandemic but particularly about hybrid teaching that ranged from hype to skewering. For any readers unaware of this way of teaching being put into practice during the pandemic in many schools across the country as schools slowly reopen, teachers teach face-to-face with a small number of students while conducting the same lesson through Zoom, Google, or other platforms to their students at home. Here are some photos of hybrid teaching at both K-12 and college:
John Thompson: A Hilarious Novel about Life in the Classroom Today
Who knew that “adequate yearly progress” and “accountability” could be the subject of a comic novel? John Thompson just read that novel and he reviews it here.
Roxanna Elden’s Adequate Yearly Progress is a hilarious, satirical novel that nails the very serious truths about the real world effects of corporate school reform. Although Elden’s humor spectacularly illuminates the reformers’ often-absurd mindsets, she also reveals the good, bad, and the ugly of a diverse range of human beings.
Adequate Yearly Progress begins with Lena, a young, black, literature teacher returning to school at Brae Hill Valley High School in a high-challenge Texas neighborhood. The way she is greeted starts to reveal some of the flaws of the complex people who teach there. A colleague asked, “Don’t you read the news? Miss Phil-a-delphia?” She thus assumed that Lena comes from a city where everyone is in a hurry and no one attends church.
Here’s another batch of cartoons on what all of us have experienced since the pandemic upended our lives. I believe that smiling, chuckling, and even laughing during difficult times is helpful. So Enjoy.
They tell us that our schools will fully re-open sometime during the coming year. This is good news for some of the kids and bad for others. For most, it will be a mixed bag.
Most will be thrilled to be back again amongst their peers, to play together, to touch one another, to wrestle and pretend and bicker and create together. Likewise, most, in the strange, unexpected freedom the pandemic gave them, will have forgotten the cruelties of classroom management, the sitting quietly, the arbitrary rules, the adults in charge of everything from when they are to urinate to what they are to think. It's never pretty to train living things in captivity and they return to us having tasted life itself in all it's savor and bitterness.
One thing I can tell you about all the children is that after what they will have survived they are beyond our curriculum and assessment tools. They have seen, done, and felt things we don't understand; that they don't understand and need to explore. They will have become new humans, shaped by historic events in ways that we can't imagine. They will have vital and important stories to tell, art to create, dances to CONTINUE READING: Teacher Tom: Life Itself
Most readers of this blog Zoom for work, birthdays, anniversaries, and sadly, for funerals in these surreal pandemic times. Then there are the millions of students who received instruction on Zoom from preschoolers to high school seniors. Many of those Zoomers, maybe all, are Zoomed out. Not only Zoom but other devices and software stretch the limits of pandemic patience. Whatever devices and software readers use, I have collected cartoons that poke an elbow in the ribs and hope that they will tease out a smile. Enjoy!
Rob Tornoe’s coronavirus cartoon for Friday, May 15.
This is the problem with letting dilettantes, even well-intended dilettantes, lead when it comes to education policy. They don't have the experience to recognize what real learning looks like, and since they tend to come from the world of business, they don't trust mere "employees" (teachers), especially if they belong to a union, so they come up with arbitrary data points that carry with them a hint of education-ness, then subject children to their amateur hour. I don't think that most of them want to be cruel to children and their parents, but in their ignorance they believe they know better because they've managed to make money off selling software or hardware or something, so they conjure up education-ish sounding ideas and, because they can, they impose them, despite the objections of those of us who do have the experience to know what real learning looks like.
Anyone who has spent any time in a classroom knows that real learning does not look like children slumped in chairs staring at iPads. Real learning looks like stepping in a puddle you've made with your friends, then sinking in until the water tops your boots.
Cartoons on Life at Home and in School During Covid-19
For this month’s featuring cartoons, I collected a batch that tickled me and hope they will do the same for you in the eighth month of the pandemic. Enjoy!
