Teachable Moments

I love comics and cartoons. A few years ago I counted up and determined that I read and enjoy 54 either comic strips or cartoons every day. To give you a sense of where I’m coming from, I especially like Boondocks, Curtis, Dilbert, Doonesbury, For Better or Worse, Foxtrot, Non Sequitur, Sally Forth, Sylvia, Zits, and others. Hell, I even like Big Nate, Bizarro, Luann, Rose is Rose, and Zippy the Pinhead. I greatly enjoy the stick figure strips of Randall Munroe, and I lament at least once per week the passing of Pogo and Calvin and Hobbes (the last Sunday C&H strip is mounted and hangs above my desk). I think Peanuts is incredibly redundant and greatly overrated, although I loved it as a kid. No strip is more redundant than Beetle Bailey. And in my lifetime I have never laughed at a frame of Marmaduke.

Then there’s The New Yorker, Slate Magazine, and the dozens of wonderful political cartoonists everywhere ... well don’t get me started on that. Frankly, it would be difficult for me to get along without my daily fix of cartoons and comic strips.

When the Chronicle of Higher Education included cartoon some years ago, I was very enthusiastic. But, you know, the myriad cartoons I encountered there barely elicited a snicker. So when InsideHigherEd added the cartoons of Matthew Henry Hall I had very low expectations ... and my expectations were completely realized (although his drawings are excellent). I’m confident education is bizarre — and it’s certainly susceptible to parody and satire – but somehow or other, it doesn’t strike me as being very funny. Perhaps it’s because there are excellent cartoonists out there who don’t have an insider’s grasp of education ... or (and I know more than my fair share of) educators who generally don’t have very sophisticated (cartoonist’s) senses of humor, but I hardly ever (in fact never) happen upon the optimal combination of cartoonist and educator.

In any event, I was inspired to chuckle in response to today’s cartoon ... finally.