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Tuesday, September 09, 2008

That damned desk

What's Mallard raving about today?

Grading curves, teachers, unions.

Not only that, but Mallard's school bussed white kids into the inner duck pond schools.

13 comments:

NotannonNotcow said...

And Mallard got a D- in this class?

Anonymous said...

Not only did Mallard's school break racial barriers by mingling white kids and waterfowl, but it also broke spatial barriers. Is that kid sitting behind or to the right of Mallard?

Unknown said...

Mallard was classmates with a young Bill Gates, it appears.

Kaitlyn said...

Kindeg - no, PRESCHOOLERS aren't that tiny.

So wait, if the teacher is bitching about the union, does that mean that teachers are good now?

It's only Tuesday. He could continue on and on with the curve thing, or go on to something less topical and less funny.

Anonymous said...

Is the teacher's desk eleven feet tall? Standing on a platform? Hovering? Are the students in a pit? Or was Mallard taught by the obelisk in 2001? Surely he hasn't run out of weird caricatures to denigrate teachers, has he?

Toots McGee said...

I puzzled over the dimensions and the perspective for a few minutes. First I thought the teacher used a lecturn and was hiding behind it. Then I figured out that it was a desk, but there was no room for the straw teacher once the wall o' text and young Mallard and his classmate (my first thought was George Will) were added in. So Tinsley wanted to shake up the layout after the last (what is it, eight?) days. He couldn't lose his series title and the big anvil over the head red arrow, so the teacher is now a huge desk. It is an obelisk, in a sense. A big monolithic representation of that scourge of ducks everywhere, teachers.

Teachers are horrible people really. They want you to develop your own critical thinking skills. They can't just tell you what's good and what's bad and call it a day. Plus, these miserable tax dollar wasting cretins have the nerve to "organize" and request be treated like professionals and have input into the structure and the curriculum of the institutions that employ them. The teachers unions (like all unions, really) are just commie fronts, dedicated to removing good old fashion, small town American values, the pledge of allegiance and the bible from the classroom.

If I had my way, the teachers would be unpaid volunteers (retired cops or unemployed auto workers or whoever) who would oversee the classroom. In each class period, a bible would be passed around the room so each student could place his hand upon it and say the pledge of allegience one at a time, nice and loud, not skipping any words. During the remainder of the class, the "teacher" (we'll think of a better word so as not to insult these patriots) will do activities like take the unabridged works of Shakespeare and put them on one side of a scale and a CD of the Beatles Number One Hits on the other side of the scale thus demonstrating their relative values. Oh, and in gym, there will be bloodthirsty, no holds barred dodge ball (officiated by prison guards on "administrative leave") because these kids are getting too soft nowadays, and by God, there will be winners and losers, because that's the way it is in the real world!

GeoX, one of the GeoX boys. said...

O teachers are my lessons done?
I cannot do another one
They laughed and laughed
And said well child,
"Are your lessons done?
"Are your lessons done?"

Marion Delgado said...

I defy you to tell this from a Mallard effort by the writing:

http://www.theonion.com/content/files/images/KellyCollegeGraduation.jpg

Anonymous said...

The thing that gets me? Today's cartoon effectively states that the curves Tinsley faced were true bell curves--the large chunk of students who got average grades got Cs, students who did notably better or worse got Bs and Ds, while the very, very few outliers got As and Fs.

Not something you see in high schools, really, but let's give Tinsley the benefit of the doubt, shall we?

(We'll also ignore that the curve referred to in yesterday's cartoon sounds like a different sort of curve.)

A few days ago, then, when we saw Tinsley writing about getting D- grades, he was essentially admitting to being a couple of standard deviations below the average.

Really, Tinsley, it wasn't your teachers--if you were that far below the average, they couldn't have reached you no matter how great they were, and they couldn't have ruined you no matter how horrible they were. Either you didn't deserve to be in the magnet school your parents bought your way into, or you should have been moved to the remedial classes. Either way, you've now officially admitted to not just being a whiner, but a stupid whiner. Give it up and go home.

Anonymous said...

I'm not sure Mallard has grasped this concept of a "grading on a curve".


I shall illustrate roughly how it looks:

----
/ \
___/ \___

Now, pretend that was a perfect bell curve. Here's the tricky part:

There are students in all parts of the graph for all grades. It is not this:

_______________


And the hypocritical part: Republicans will lament grade inflation. It's a hippy thing to give everyone a good grade to raise self esteem. But give them personally a bad grade and all of a sudden, NO ONE had a good grade because naturally, if there was a good grade, they'd get it and so the whole system is whacked.

Kaitlyn said...

OH.

MY.

GOD.

Today, my history teacher (who is going to get a higher degree (doctorate or masters, some elitist nonsensical piece of paper) in WOMEN'S STUDIES) said "I won't ask you for the specific date on the test."

She's putting EVENTS over DATES.

Oh, god, she's going to make me vote for Osam - I mean Obama.

What am I going to do?

I don't think the great Tinz will address my problem, so I trust you, his followers, will help.

Anonymous said...

Something about this tells me that Mallard got all those D-minuses on purpose. Maybe he thought he was sticking it to the man.

rewinn said...

More lazy cartooning. Tinsley can't even bother to knock out crude drawing of teacher, a balloon or quotes.

He's even too hung over for a four-dot ellipsis.

I *did* appreciate the comments here about curves, grade inflation and all that thinky stuff ...

... but it's really just Tinsley being lazy. A competent and caring cartoonist could really have done an amusing (if wrong-headed) cartoon by learning to draw and, more importantly, caring about quality.

Luckily, the Ducky and his companion Prickly City aren't about quality; they're about providing Soviet-style propaganda for the Party. And we all know how bad Party-line "Art" can be.