The latest in the series of #tuesdaysketch challenges – this time, the topic was caricatures.

Thank you, thankyouverymuch.

This is not the comic I meant to do today… but as things unfolded, this is the comic I needed to do today.

As I settled in this morning to work on a comic for today, I had ideas – I was potentially going to hit you with another Star Trek comic or maybe a new Gayzilla.  I flipped on the television – manually, I’m old school like that – and as my laptop booted up, I see that the cable box has somehow managed to settle on MTV since the last time I used it.  And, since Season 2 starts tonight, apparently they’re running a marathon of Jersey Shore.

I started fishing around for the remote.  It escalated from a mild rummage to a blind panic as more and more brain cells jumped ship rather than be used to process the horrors on screen.  Sweaty morons lifting weights, talking about how awesome they are, dumb girls who I wouldn’t approach with a 10-foot-pole (judging from at least one of them, they might start trying to pole dance).

To steal a line from The Bob and Tom Show, “If this is on here, what’s playing in Hell?”

I’m not a fan of Reality Television, never have been.  And I don’t mean to overreact… but if I had a time machine, I would travel back in time, find the person who first thought of Reality Television, and put a six inch railroad spike through one of their eyes.  Then I’d travel forward, and if we still had Reality TV, I’d go back and do it again.  And again.  Until I’d snuffed out all these mutherf*ers.

But even the worst of the entries thus far – most of which were by Fox – don’t hold a candle to this crap.  And I’m not the only one who thinks so.  I saw a news story pop up this evening with New Jersey’s own governor Chris Christie saying that the show was a “negative for New Jersey”.

So at least it’s not just me.

I honestly don’t know what this is.

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This week’s (severely late) #tuesdaysketch entry.  This week’s topic was a “Favorite Literary Character”, and I went with good ol’ Arthur Dent from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

All that’s required… is that we be absolutely horrible bastards to the children.

We need to face the reality that our education system is horribly inefficient.  We reward mediocratiy, punish excellence, and ensure that no child is left behind – no matter how poorly they’re doing, or how much some of them probably ought to be left behind.

Remember – no child left behind also usually means no child allowed ahead.  The smartest child in each class is chained to the stupidest, and only allowed to advance ahead when either a) the stupidest kid gets whatever it is that they’re supposed to be learning, or b) the teacher gives up and decides the stupidest kid is someone else’s problem, preferably in the next grade level up.

By then, you’ve completely lost the smart child.  With luck, they’ve gnawed their own legs off and are running (ok, limping) free in the fields of independent study… they no longer get good grades, because they no longer care about whatever it is they’re “supposed” to be learning, but at least they’re learning something.

And that’s the best case scenario. 

I think the root of the problem is “review”.  This was always a serious problem when I was in school, and it’s become a bigger issue as we’ve slipped further down the spiral.  Out of each year (especially during the elementary and secondary school phase) a significant period of the year is spent reviewing the lessons they should have learned the year before. 

Let me say that again, only louder – REVIEWING THE THINGS THEY SHOULD HAVE LEARNED THE YEAR BEFORE!

I could understand needing to re-teach some of the lessons, especially if they’re related to the current lesson at hand (addition before going into multiplication, multiplication before going into factors, etc), but that’s rarely the scenario.  No, instead, the first few months of the Fifth Grade are usually “The Fourth Grade 2: Electric Bugaloo”.  Not even a remix, just a long, drawn-out retelling of all the things from the last year on the outside chance you weren’t paying attention back then.  Don’t worry, if you’re not paying attention now either – there will be a review of the review when we’re done reviewing the review.

The problem is that we’re afraid to let kids fail.  We don’t keep score in sports, because if we kept score one of the teams would lose.  Nevermind the team that would win – winning isn’t everything.  That’s a great mantra, by the way -  nothing quite says “aim low, expect nothing” like teaching kids that “winning isn’t everything”.  So we review, then review the reviews, then review those reviews of the reviews, in the hope that eventually the lowest 1% might get the drift (even if you have to sacrifice the upper 10% to get there).  And don’t even get me started on teachers “teaching for tests”.  God.

But that’s ok – there are no losers, because there are no winners.  We’ve made sure of that.

But how do we fix this?  In high school, once you get to multi-segmented classes (AP, CP, Regular, Remedial) they can scale the classes and grade kids on their abilities, allowing a natural sorting of capabilities and a wider range of success for individuals.  With the fence posts for achievement moved further apart, the “chain” from before is a lot longer – and with the possibility to even skip ahead grades based on abilities, they’re gone completely in some instances.

But that’s not a viable answer for the lower grades, because kids (not teens, just kids here) are still maturing by leaps and bounds, and you’d have to re-evaluate them on a monthly… weekly… possibly daily basis to get the same line data that you can get on a yearly basis in a few years.  Plus, there’s the issue of social groups, herd mentality, peership, and all that other crap that we’d be messing with.

When I was growing up, Summer Vacation was a glorious multi-month period of lesure, relaxation, abject laziness, and self-improvement.  Kids played, which helped keep them fit and active.  Older kids got jobs, which taught them about work ethics, the value of a buck, responsibility, and (more often than not) the opposite sex.

Nowadays, vacation borders are no longer sacred – if it snows too much in the winter, we gain those extra snow days back as additional school days at the end.  12 weeks has been pared down to 7 or 8, depending on the circuimstances, and some places are moving towards getting rid of it altogether.

School years are ending later and starting earlier, but obviously our children aren’t getting any smarter.  In fact, if anything, they’re probably getting dumber.  So I say we we bring back Summer Vacation… back, with a vengence.

For all of you who TL:DR’d down to this, here’s my plan:

At the end of the 2 Month Summer, everybody goes back to school and takes a proficiency test that tests them on the previous year’s material, to see if they pass or fail.  And this is a hard pass, like 75-80% or higher is pass, under that is fail, because we actually need to make sure they know this shit.

 If you pass, you get another month of vacation, no strings attached.  If you fail, it’s a month of intensive review.

At the end of the month of intensive review, you take the test again.  If you pass, you advance.  If you fail again after a month of review, you get held back a grade.  Then, school starts – for those who passed (with or without the review period) they get to move on to new lessons, with only the review of related subjects.

The other beauty of this is that it eliminates the chance for teachers to, as I mentioned before, “teach for tests”, which I think is probably the single biggest abomination of the education system to date.  The kids have to not only learn, during the course of the year, all their lessons – they’re then asked to remember them.  Heaven forbid.  And without the direct influence of the education system, we actually learn how much the children are actually learning.

Of course, it’s not without some flaws – someone will always argue that their darling pecious snowflake angel does not test well, or can’t take the pressure, or doesn’t feel well, or is allergic to stress.  To which I would reply – tough shit.  Every day of real life is stress, every time you walk out the door the world is testing you, and maybe if you stop telling your brat what they can’t do maybe they’ll start showing you what they can do.

If today’s comic looks a little… different… and by that, I mean “better than usual”, than you’re right.  Full story below the cut, but what’s really important is that we have Carlo Jose San Juan to thank for providing the artwork for today’s comic.  He is the author and artist behind the well-drawn, well-written, oft duck-filled Callous - which you should check out (and I would still be recommending even if it were not for the fact that he just did guest art for me).

See, what happened is this – I had today’s comic all planned out (as one of my infamous “I’ve got a bad idea I need to write down” notebook quick sketches) but before I ever got a chance to enact it, I was forced into a mandatory double-and-then-some shift at work when the next shift didn’t actually bother to show up.  So I put out a distress call on Twitter, and @callouscomics was kind enough to answer.

I threw together a quick text summary of my ideas (included below) and he quickly and efficiently produced the high quality artistic extrapolation that you see for today’s comic.  In order to appreciate what he had to go through, here’s my notes I provided:

This comic was to be based on (and reuse a few elements from) this comic:  http://www.theappleofdiscord.com/comics/aod/random-encounter-super-friends/

These were MY plans. You can take them any direction you want. Only thing I’d ask is that you keep the width of the final product to at or around 600px.

First panel was planned to be a title panel of the original comic, as is occasionally my thing, reading “Adoption Of The Super Friends” in a similar over-the-top 70′s television-y font.

Second Panel – Standard two-shot; Batman, looking slightly confused, on the left side while The Incredible Hulk (or a reasonable likeness) is on the right side looking angry. Batman says “Buh… the hell?” upon seeing The Hulk, while the Hulk replies with “ME WANT CANDY BAR!” in a bold font to imply he’s screaming.

Third Panel – Same shot as before – to be honest, I was planning on copypasta-ing this entire panel from the last one and then adding on. Batman is now smirking, and holding a batarang, and says “I got your candy right here.” The Wonder Twins are now standing in front of The Hulk, and reply “Don’t hurt him, Batman! We found him wandering lost and confused. Can we keep him?” Truncate and re-arrange words as needed to make fit.

Fourth Panel – Close up of the two Wonder brats. Both are doing their best “cute puppy” looks. I was going to use the same font as the title to write above them “WONDER TWIN BEGGING POWER – ACTIVATE!” No other text.

Fifth Panel – Close up 1/3 shot of Batman, probably a different drawing than before, maybe with his arms up or something. Big empty space to dump text. Bats says “Sorry, kids, our universe already has a brain-damaged super-strong moron, and that’s probably one-too-many if you ask me.” From off-screen, the twins reply “Awwwwww.”

Sixth Panel – Wide shot, Bats now in the middle, kids and Hulk now on far right side. May even cheat and use a zoomed out show of panel 3. Bats’ body is still facing the kids, but is now looking over his shoulder at Superman, who has just entered from the left. Superman has an eager expression and says “Did someone say candy bar? Clark want candy bar too!” Bats replies “I rest my case.” Kids, Hulk are silent.

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Compare and contrast today’s poster to the real deal for added lulz.