Category: Commentary

Interesting Times Friday Mailbag: "Doin’ It For Marks"

Posted on by Nathan

Please send in your questions to
journalcomic at gmail dot com
and maybe you will get to see your question answered
in a Friday Mailbag!
Alternately, you may see them in a “Friday” Mailbag,
which happens when I forget or am otherwise preoccupied on a Friday
and write it on Saturday instead!
How Exciting

[BEGIN COMMENTARY] I am going to toot my own horn and say that yes, I am pretty good at writing essays. “But wait,” you cry, “I’ve seen all your report cards and you never really do better than like a B average in English classes. How can you claim to be good?” Well, the B was attained with no great effort on my part, and I get good grades on essays I’ve banged out the night before. So I always said to myself, just think what you could achieve with only a little more effort! But rather than put in that effort, I remained satisfied with knowing that I could if I wanted to. [June 12, 2012]

nooo, this place is a mess! this won’t do at all

Posted on by Nathan

I have no idea what would have happened to this comic in the long run, had I finished becoming a teacher. If there was one thing that the Faculty of Education impressed upon us it was that openly posting personal stuff, even something as relatively innocent as these comics, has the potential to be a liability to an educator. The professor I spoke to did report later that this site is “probably okay” given that it’s pretty tame, but did advise that I be cautious all the same.

The time commitment for posting, though usually less than an hour, was also something that became too much when I was actually in practicum. Go forward in time from here and you’ll see that I took a hiatus of several weeks while I tried to stay afloat in the wonderful world of teaching. More on that later. [June 12, 2012]

Eternal Clock-Radio Silencing Fist of the North Star!!

Posted on by Nathan

Okay so what’s happening in the last panel is a reference to the show “Fist of the North Star”, a cartoon about a denim-wearing superhero wandering a post-apocalyptic wasteland and using his incredible martial arts to solve problems. Every so often he uses a Special Move and the action freezes while the name of that move is displayed on the screen. Also a narrator shouts the name. So, yeah. That’s what I was trying to do. I just copied the Japanese characters straight from the show, which my household was very into at the time. [June 12, 2012]

is it too audacious to suggest you check your messages later?

Posted on by Nathan

teachers and EAs - you will get the best looks on your students' faces when you call them on it

This comic was inspired by my peers in the faculty of education, who, despite being educated adults, thought they could get away with texting in class. It was kinda ridiculous. However I will admit that there was something about Ed. that caused many of us to revert to school habits from younger days; we had degrees and yet couldn’t help being cliquey and disruptive and generally just like the students we were supposed to be learning to handle.

Oh and check out the lower left corner, somebody didn’t check to see if any lines were straying outside of the border… [June 12, 2012]

I was unsuccessful today, can you tell

Posted on by Nathan

I really like panel 2’s bureaucrat, with his ready-made FAIL stamp and tiny smile as he prepares to crush yet another one of the hopeless, unwashed rabble that show up at his desk.

My hometown is about a fifteen minute drive from American border. In times past, all you usually needed was your drivers’ licence to cross back and forth easily. The Canadian and American border crossing buildings were roughly the size of small houses and the guards typically polite if not friendly. In the last decade or so,  many changes have been made, especially to the American side; the size of their facility has been greatly expanded, the guards seem to have gotten rather more brusque, and a simple driver’s licence is no longer enough. Now, you need a valid passport. (Or a NEXUS card, whatever that is)

So: the Canadian government makes a huge push to urge all citizens to get passports, which is when this comic takes place. Simultaneously, our provincial government spends loads of money to roll out the Enhanced ID Card as an optional alternative. It’s your driver’s licence but with some extra security features, and as a bonus it’s supposed to work in place of a passport at border crossings. By all accounts it was actually a great deal more hassle to get than a standard passport, and on top of that, if you wanted to travel outside of North America you’d of course need a regular passport anyway.

(This next is unfounded rumor, but I also heard that in one instance the border guards didn’t like the EID and made the driver produce a passport all the same)

So of course everybody got passports, and the special Enhanced ID Centre offices that were built around the province (including one in my hometown) went underused and were eventually shut down, while the provincial government cried that it couldn’t understand why nobody wanted EID cards. [June 7, 2012]