| day seventy five. |
[Feb. 8th, 2010|08:23 pm] |
I don’t know if these days are called “in-service” universally, so briefly: It’s a day where the teachers come in and do stuff (professional development and the like) where there are no students present. I think it’s clear from the comic, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned from my job, it’s that you can never been TOO clear about something.
...and by the way, I don't eat a lot of fast food, but "a fistful" is the proper amount to ask for when you get McDonalds. If you ask for "a couple", they give you two. |
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| riddle me this.... |
[Feb. 4th, 2010|06:14 am] |
As I'm not posting any comics today, I thought I'd take a chance to answer any questions people might have. I'm doing this primarily because while I'm pretty good about responding to e-mails I receive about my comic strip, I am fucking HORRIBLE about answering comments on LiveJournal. I always feel guilty about it. I don't find myself altogether interesting so I feel awkward when someone is genuinely curious about my teaching, my comics, or anything else.
For one day I will ignore my awkwardness. If you've got a question for me, post it in the comments and I'll do my level best to answer it. It could be about the comic strip or my job... or it could just be a random off-the-cuff query. I think there will be a prize for "Best Question", which will be awarded tomorrow (provided you live in the continental United States). |
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| day sixty nine through seventy four. |
[Feb. 3rd, 2010|07:15 pm] |
…and to my great surprise, this brings us to the END of the first semester of classes. While there are only sixty-odd strips posted in the past five months, if you add in the strips I “held back” on my four-a-week schedule, you get something like 85 comics drawn in the past few months. Since a school year is 180 days, I’m just about to my halfway point.
I thought about doing one comic a day for all of our testing days, but quite honestly there just isn’t a lot going on.
So no comic tomorrow and next Monday begins Semester Two. |
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| day sixty eight. |
[Feb. 2nd, 2010|07:00 pm] |
This comic requires you to remember the following facts about my class:
(1) We’ve been reading Animal Farm for the past three weeks.
(2) In addition, I decided to try and quickly knock out a three-day business letter activity in the middle of reading Animal Farm.
(3) The school had a snow day and TWO two-hour delays in a row, throwing all planning and organization for thos projects into disarray.
I should probably also mention that this comic takes place *right* before Christmas Break (that’s the two weeks off to which Seth is referring). I’m trying to avoid direct references to the holidays in the comics I post here, lest they seem even more dated then they are… but I’ve drawn a couple of Halloween/Thanksgiving/Christmas type strips that will be posted in the inevitable and unnecessary print collection somewhere down the road. |
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| chalkboard photo post #14 |
[Jan. 31st, 2010|07:39 pm] |
Some chalkboard drawings from my classroom in the past week. We're in the midst of Act I of "Romeo and Juliet" and all that entails.
I suppose now is as good a time as any to quickly mention that there will be only three comics this week. There's a natural reason why I'm only doing three and I think it'll make sense by Wednesday... but I don't want to leave anyone shocked and dismayed unexpectedly. |
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| day sixty five. |
[Jan. 27th, 2010|07:25 pm] |
Not to cram it down anyone’s eyeballs, but DonorsChoose just did something really helpful for people like me who like to cart out their projects for folks by letting us pick a normal URL for our Giving Pages. Before I had to cut and paste a whole field of numbers and backslashes that I couldn’t commit to memory if I were some kind of genius.
I am not some kind of genius. If you want to check out my projects, here’s the easy-to-remember address:
http://www.donorschoose.org/chrispearce
…and I’ll add it as a link somewhere on the site this weekend (along with the long-promised list of comic sites) so I can stop with these incessant reminders. |
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| day sixty four. |
[Jan. 26th, 2010|07:42 pm] |
Yes, that IS the best drawing of a sow's ear you've ever seen, right? |
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| day sixty two and a half. |
[Jan. 22nd, 2010|08:16 pm] |
I struggled a lot with yesterday’s comic. The aim was to draw something about the idea that when you correct a scantron test, it’s immediately obvious how your kids did on the test by the loud noise the machine makes as it corrects their marks.
Sometimes you slide a test through the machine and you hear one click and you think “Awesome! Johnny did a good job on this week’s vocabulary test!” Other times you send it through and it sounds like yesterday’s strip.
Yesterday’s comic focused on the negative a little too much and it bugged me until I remembered this morning that I actually DID a scantron comic about four or five years back. While I had completely forgotten about it when I drew the more recent of the two strips, you can see I lifted aspects of the old strip whole cloth for the new one.
I feel like this is a better representation of what I was trying to communicate with yesterday’s strip, so I thought I’d post this one here for comparison. I think it’s interesting (and sort of sad) that I did a better comic about teaching when I was substituting back in 2004 than I did in 2010 as a teacher with five years experience. |
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| day sixty two. |
[Jan. 21st, 2010|07:31 pm] |
Just to be clear, scantrons are FINE for taking a quick pulse of the class… I just feel like they’re better used in say, a math class. |
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| day sixty. |
[Jan. 19th, 2010|07:40 pm] |
I can’t help but point out that today is the sixtieth teaching comic. My original plan was to do somewhere in the neighborhood of 180 teaching comics, representative of an entire year’s worth of teaching. Truth be told, I have somewhere around 70 comics drawn, with several held back due to my “4 a week” posting schedule. Still, it’s a nice milestone for me, personally. |
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| Geek Out Saturday |
[Jan. 16th, 2010|08:49 pm] |
I was luckily enough to have one of my DonorsChoose projects funded this week, thanks to donations from a few of my readers and a generous grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Honestly, I really shot for the moon with this project as far as money goes, and I never expected it to be fully funded. Another collection of graphic novels, I really tried to broaden the scope of my lending library beyond the handful of superhero books I requested in the last project, although I did remember to keep some of the DC/Marvel stuff in there as well.
I know I spend a whole lot of time plugging my various DC projects here, so for a change I thought I'd show you some of the materials that the donations provide, with my reasons for choosing them for my classroom.
( $600 worth of graphic novels for my classroom )
...and there you have it. Hey, if anyone's reading this and you've any suggestions for additional comics to add to my library, I'm putting together another graphic novel proposal this week. Let me know in the comments! |
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