Hola, Sneakers! Welcome to Episode 382 of the only working-class podcast on the internet! We normally only apologize for our so-so content, but this week we must apologize for a raw-throated Ian and a weary Dave.
We also should apologize for: our money-back guarantee; our terrible self-promotion; Australian compliments; insulted nations; too local papers; Miao-cDonalds; microwaved burgers; slow fast food; Ian the con man; the agony and the ecstasy of DoodleArt;
Canadianisms; making Sneakers respond to questions about influential comic strips and cartoons including Peanuts, B.C., The Far Side, Battle of the Planets, Robotech, Warner Brothers cartoons, The Flinstones, Doonesbury, The Beatles cartoon show, Kimba the White Lion; Hi and Lois; and Josie and the Pussycats; parental avoidance; no underdogs allowed; jocks in the media; lonely children; our new world; squalid teenage sex; corporal punishment; Snoopy’s alter-egos; Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck’s bad comics; unfunny reverence; lack of new ideas; Pixar’s magic napkin; boring water; choir rivals; and, finally, the devil’s fiddling.
This week’s Question of the Week: What sort of discipline did your school practice growing up? Was your school progressive, proactive or pro-hitting? Let us know!!!
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Hoagy Carmichael? Hoagy Quartzmichael.
It’s all I got.
I remember Cary Granite and Stoney Curtis! So if they did the same thing with today’s celebs making guest appearances, Sharon Stone and The Rock wouldn’t have to change their names at all..
Although my first thought was Hoagy Carmica, I’m going with Hoagy Carmarble as my official pitch for his Flintstone name.
Dave, I’d invite you to join our women’s choir, but you’d have to Tootsie/Mrs. Doubtfire it up. We’ve got a few really tall altos so you may just be able to blend in.
Mnemonics for the bass clef I learned at piano lessons: Good Boys Deserve Fudge Always (lines) and All Cows Eat Grass (spaces).
From the department of corrections: the photo VanCAF is using is from last year’s VanCAF, not our book signing event.
Ooops!
To answer the question of the week, I believe the strap was banned when I was in about Grade 4. As a quiet, fairly well behaved child who also avoided the misfortune of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, I was never subjected to being strapped, but I do remember one boy in particular who received the strap on more than one occasion. Typically the Head Teacher administered it, rather than the classroom teacher. Was it deserved? I’m sure it could have been handled differently. Did it help? Well, the boy in question never made it to his mid-20’s due to misadventure, so it certainly didn’t alter any negative tendencies, or not enough, anyway. As a teacher, my first job was in a private school, and I had numerous parents approach me early in the school year to tell me it was fine with them if I hit their kids; one mom was even quite insistent that I did so if her son misbehaved. I didn’t, of course.
Thankfully, our school district also banned the strap partway through my elementary school years so I only got a brief afterschool detention for passing a “___ loves ___” note in Grade 5. Other available punishments included trash pick-up duty around the school. These days, one of the harshest forms of discipline my sister-the-teacher can mete out is to confiscate the cells of in-class texters and to send the phones to the principal’s office for future retrieval by the errant student.
My high school in Mesquite, Texas gave you the choice between “Swats” or “Licks” and a week’s worth of detention after school. I received swats/licks only once, along with three classmates for being late to gym. It stung for a few minutes but better that than taking my time away after school.
One of my best stories is from art class, I regard it as my Chico Marx moment and it’s one of the greatest moments of my life….please bear with me as I attempt to tell it.
I’ll preface this story with the fact that it involves malapropism wordplay, so you might have to think or speak it phonetically. So here goes….
My senior art class, 1984, this was Monday and we were ready to learn about some printing techniques. My teacher writes “moiré” on the blackboard really big. So you all know, moiré (pronounced MORE Ray) is when the dot pattern in printing gets out of register and creates kind of a moving optical illusion pattern. Our project that day was to create a moiré so we would have an understanding how it happens and what causes it.
My art teacher asks the class, “Does anyone know what a moiré is?” I stand just like Chico did in Horsefeathers…because I could not pass this up. “Okay Eddie, tell the class what a moiré is.”
I return with, “When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that’s a moiré!”
My art teacher and I hated each other, we butted heads on everything and it’s a wonder I even passed this class. This was the last straw for her. She pointed to the door and told me to GET OUT! go down to the Vice Principal and wait for her. The great thing was that I knew the Vice Principal and his family since they were frequent customers in my comic book store. I told him what had happened and he laughed, “I’ll just tell her I gave you a week of detentions, but you really don’t have detention. Okay?”
My art teacher finally caught up and told the Vice Principal how I showed her up in class, she was furious. He gave me the phony detentions and I walked about three steps behind her smiling all the way back to class. I thought to myself, Chico would have been proud….I was proud. Proud to have this story to tell everyone, Marx fans or not, about my Chico Marx moment.
That’s a great line, and a wonderful story. How did the class react?
The class didn’t even get it, nor was I doing it for them as it was completely self serving and just to get a dig in on my teacher. The class was amused though because they all hated her too.
You’d think an art teacher could appreciate a student who could make a pun in Italian on a word in French. Instead, she struck out at you much like an eel from a dark gap in a coral reef (that’s a moray.) Or maybe she just wanted to stop you before you got the “gay tarantella” part of the song.
You’re giving her too much credit by calling her an art teacher. She was however, a phenomenal illustrator. Her class was run like a dictatorship, we were only allowed to use subject matter that she provided to us which was for the most part Western Cowboy art…both modern and vintage. SHE liked Western art and only those references were allowed because she liked Western art. If you drew something from a subject you liked, you got an automatic “F”. I almost failed art because of this and my Dad had to come to the school and talk to the Principal. None of the other teachers liked her and neither did the students. She should have left teaching to someone who had the skills to inspire and enlighten us more and go off to be a freelance illustrator…she would have made a ton more money too because she was very good and fast.
Here in Scotland, the teachers’ weapon of choice was the tawse – a strip of leather, usually about 18 inches long, and split into two or three tails at one end. A short whip, essentially. Schoolchildren called it the belt or the strap. Some teachers – you know the kind – had pet names for theirs.
You would be called in front of the class and told to hold out one hand, supported by the other. The supporting hand ensured that you felt the full force of the belt striking across your palm. It stung like a rope burn and left a hot, red mark.
Depending on the severity of your offence, you would get anything between one and six strikes, sometimes swapping hands part way. It was entirely the teacher’s choice as to when to use this punishment. I was strapped one time for getting a wrong answer in long division. Afterwards, the teacher realised I’d actually had it right and she was wrong. I got an apology, and a hatred of injustice.
Use of the tawse faded away in the 1980s, following a judgment from the European Court of Human Rights. It was eventually banned in 1987.
In fourth grade, with a nose filled with the goo that grows in the petri dish known as elementary school, I frantically ran to the hook where my coat awaited with an already drippy backup handkerchief, but also with a stash of unused Kleenex in one of the pockets. Already sensing the imminent sound of the next period bell, I ran down the hallway and was grabbed by the school principal and thrown against the wall. The bell rang, I was late, and had to do extra homework that evening.
Ten years later, a tornado came through the town and nailed that elementary school. I made a point of returning the the site and dancing a little jig on the rubble.