Next Series Preview: Class Sketches

Ive been cleaning a few boxes in my office, and I keep coming across piles of my doodles and in class sketches from the past 15 years of teaching and learning.  One of the ways I have always stayed focused in any class, meeting, or lecture/conference is to doodle.  Often it takes on the persona of the content itself - whatever I draw representing in some way the content of the day, but not always.  The margins and extra pages of my books were always full of my current friends groups, Animaniacs - or other Super Hero related characters - and often the people talking or sitting nearby.

In college, I began to develop the stories of Achmel and Rahim, co-adventurers modeled off of my friend Ruble and I, based on our ICQ conversations.  We traveled through time with a pair of corduroy pants (Dos Pantalones) created by the Nazis in World War Two, but hidden away in Argentina until we stumbled upon them once on a vacation.  We beat up Nazis, met famous educators, looked for ways to fix education - and even went into space to touch Sputnik, the satellite that changed education forever.  Strange stories - and most of the time the story itself never existed, just a splash page or a cover to a potential graphic novel.  I only had so much time. 

We Are The People Our Parents Warned Us About
My grade school experience at Sacred Heart was the Whole Language Approach - or that is what they called it.  We never had a grammar course - well in 4th grade they tried to use a text called WRITE SOURCE 2000 - there was a multicolored foil emblem of a pencil on the cover of the text - and if I am remembering correctly we stopped doing spelling tests for some reason in 5th grade. . . it was supposed to be "integrated" into the overall class - we would spend our time reading books, writing stories, and constructing/drawing/designing physical models and . . . stuff. Working alone or with a group - my friends and I once spent a whole month writing a script for a Star Trek show that we would then go into the hallway and practice as if we were going to film it - which we never did.  There was a lot of talk of special effects, we researched how to do rudimentary scratching on film, how to do the beaming up and down effect - but we never filmed it (We got an A!  LEARNING!).  The focus was on creativity - before PBL was officially a thing, I would say.  I wrote a story about going hunting, and not wanting to shoot the pheasant because it was too pretty - so moving!  Another story was about a talking dog and lemon (00 secret agents actually) - two detectives taking down a giant mutant tomato.  His name?  Shomato.  Yeah.  I don't know either.

Anyway - that experience led to pictures like this - among others.  There are a few, I'll call them gems but I should probably say "pictures that still make me laugh."  I'm not an artist.  I'm a doodler.  I create stupid things for myself, that I think Ill share after I finish Slaughterhouse Five.

Of course what I notice is: Lack of Cape,  Disproportionate Spiderman to Batman.  WHERE IS THE CAPE.

And I think this whole thing is just hilarious.