I keep forgetting that my older brother was 21 years old when his comic strip “Calloway the Castaway” was published in our town’s weekly newspaper. For some reason, I visualize my brother in his 30s or 40s drawing these in the middle of the night in his apartment, but, no, he was pretty much just out of high school. Ha! I don’t even remember what he looked like when he was 21. I’m glad he found these comic strips, though.
For more, start at The Lost Adventures of “Calloway the Castaway” Episode 1!
And come back next week for The Lost Adventures of “Calloway the Castaway” Episode 22 .
I knew within a couple years of teaching that I’d never be a great teacher. During my first few years, I just didn’t want to suck. It took me a while to feel like I didn’t suck at teaching, but I never felt comfortable in my own profession. I rarely felt like I was actually good. The best I consistently felt was mediocre.
Mediocre wasn’t bad. I saw a lot of teachers around me who struggled far more than I did. These teachers couldn’t manage the classroom. They didn’t know their curriculum. They were either too lenient or too strict. I’m not insulting these teachers by saying they sucked. It was a tough job, especially in certain environments (that I won’t get into here). I’m just using these teachers to balance my perspective. Yes, I had a tough time, but almost every teacher does.
I also realized that I had become the type of teacher that I had made fun of when I was in high school: I had become the bumbler, the guy who gets distracted easily, the guy who occasionally melted down but never did permanent damage (I never got ‘talked to’ about my meltdowns). Whenever I had bad moments in front of students, I thought back to my former teachers who had also reacted poorly to situations and I thought, “Oh. THAT’S why they acted like that.”
Don’t get me wrong; I wasn’t that hard on myself. When I realized that I was just a normal guy ambling through an almost impossible job, the pressure was off. I didn’t have to be a Jaime Escalante (who was probably a fraud anyway). I could be mediocre and still be somewhat effective. My students usually made grade-level appropriate progress. My classroom disasters were limited enough that I could laugh about them afterward. I handled the vast majority of issues without getting parents or principals involved. I had some great moments for sure, but was I great overall? No. I was mediocre. But I was at least mediocre.
I touched on this topic about ten years ago when I wrote my blog serial “Long Story,” which is based on a true classroom experience as a student in the early 1980s. When I was in tenth grade, I actually wrote a story called “Long Story” in my English class. And I actually read it in front of my class. And the teachers that I mention below actually existed. I just changed their names.
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LONG STORY: INSPIRATIONAL VS. MEDIOCRE TEACHERS
It’s weird that the moment I was inspired to write happened in Mr. Fay-gun’s class because he wasn’t an inspirational teacher. He read novels to us in a monotone voice (my voice is monotone too, so I can relate) and seemed to go out of his way to make class boring.
Mr. Fay-guns wasn’t a bad teacher; he just wasn’t inspirational. None of my high school teachers were. One teacher was perspirational. My senior math teacher reeked of body odor, and his white shirts had constant wet spots under the armpits. Looking back, I feel bad for him. The poor guy was probably nervous all the time, being surrounded by high school kids who weren’t interested in calculus (I wasn’t either, but I needed the grade). I would have been nervous too.
Mr. Dillon, my tenth grade social studies teacher, sat at his desk and read the newspaper to us for about 15 minutes each period. Since he liked sports, we usually talked about football in the fall and baseball in the spring. I liked Mr. Dillon’s class, but he wasn’t inspirational at all.
Mr. McAllister, my 11th grade government teacher, called me “Jimmy, the Geek” every day. I was a geek, but nobody else ever called me a geek to my face. There was a football prognosticator on television back then called Jimmy the Greek, but I don’t think Mr. McAllister was making a play on words because he called a bunch of other smart kids “geek,” and I was the only Jimmy. He called other kids worse names: “moron,” “dipstick,” “dummy,” “el stupido,” and “moose breath” were his favorites. With Mr. McAllister, “geek” was about as good as any student was going to get. That wasn’t very inspirational.
You can read more of this story at Long Story: Inspirational vs. Mediocre Teachers.
Also read Challenges in Teaching: Getting Students To Pronounce My Name Correctly
Some readers might think that the comic strip “Calloway the Castaway” starts getting weird here. My older brother was a fan of the comic strip “Pogo” by Walt Kelly, and in the next few episodes, he starts to borrow Kelly’s style a little bit. The emphasis in the comic strip is the storyline rather than the punchline, and there will be more stuff going on in the panels.
Even back in 1979, I liked the change, but it might have been a little much for readers of our local weekly newspaper. A lot of people didn’t/don’t ‘get’ “Pogo.” Even now, I don’t always ‘get’ “Pogo.”
I don’t think any readers ever complained, though. At least if they did, the complaints never made it to the letters page.
For more, start at The Lost Adventures of “Calloway the Castaway” Episode 1!
And come back next week for The Lost Adventures of “Calloway the Castaway” Episode 21.
I’m kind of in an anti-Roman Empire mood right now. Maybe I’ve watched too many movies or television shows centered around the Roman Empire. Maybe I’ve read too many books. If I have to blame any individual, I blame Colleen McCullough. Or maybe I should blame the Romans.
I blame Colleen McCullough because of her novel The First Man in Rome. I enjoyed the first half of it because I didn’t know much about the two Roman historical figures, Sulla and Gaius Marius. The more I read, however, the more I thought to myself, ‘what a couple of pricks.’ Then I spoiled the novel by reading a history book and finding out that these two pricks achieved pretty much what they wanted to achieve. Any setbacks they had were caused by other Romans who were also pricks.
Well, that sucks, I thought, but now I don’t have to keep reading the series. I already know what happens to the all the historical figures involved by having read a few pages of a history book. Thank you, history books!
Whether or not The First Man in Rome is worth reading is not the point. After reading hundreds of hundreds of pages of Roman conquest and infighting, I wanted a book where the Romans flat out got their asses kicked by barbarians or other non-Romans. Historically, it probably didn’t happen very often. I know of battles that the Romans lost, but those were usually followed by Roman victories that were in turn followed by Roman genocide/enslavement of opposing populations. Those types of temporary barbarian victories don’t count.
When I was a kid, there were Asterix and Obelix books that depicted the Romans as buffoons. Yeah, those comics (graphic novels) had some good moments, but some of the illustrations use stereotypical characterizations that might be considered ‘problematic’ by readers today. Then again, I’m almost 60 years old, so screw the problematix. If I want to read an Asterix and Obelix book, I’m going to read an Asterix and Obelix book.
If I want something more violent, there are also the Bran Mak Morn short stories by 1930s pulp writer Robert E. Howard where the Pict king resorts to sorcery to defeat the Romans. Yes, the Picts win, but resorting to sorcery has a price. These stories are great if you dislike the Romans (and don’t mind a little weird stuff in your ‘historical’ fiction). These stories are cool. There just aren’t that many of them.
But besides that, I don’t know of other books where the Romans get obliterated and stay that way. Maybe there’s something good about the sack of Rome or something. Or maybe I have to be satisfied with reading about or watching the Romans murder each other instead.
So maybe somebody can help me out here. If you’re not particularly fond of the Romans, then what are some good books to read?
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Similar posts (kind of) from Dysfunctional Literacy:
Julius Caesar Was a Swell Guy (according to War Commentaries of Caesar by Julius Caesar)
Robert E. Howard’s Letter to Two Nerds in the 1930s
I Found An Old Letter A Famous Author Wrote To Me
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A grammar-obsessed English teacher falls in ‘luuuvvv’ but discovers how chaotic and dangerous ‘luuuvvv’ can be.
The Sunset Rises: A 1990s Romantic Comedy
Get a signed copy of my one and only novel, The Sunset Rises: A 1990s Romantic Comedy. Free delivery in the United States!
$10.00
Or you can buy a copy here on Amazon!
Not sure? Read a sample chapter of The Sunset Rises: A 1990s Romantic Comedy.
Even though this comic strip came out in 1979, I still laugh sometimes when I see it. In fact, I think this is one of my favorites of the entire series. I hope I’m not ruining anything by saying this is one of my favorites. I know how people can get (and I include myself in that).
For more, start at The Lost Adventures of “Calloway the Castaway” Episode 1!
And come back next week for The Lost Adventures of “Calloway the Castaway” Episode 20.
When a 20 year-old coworker said that Jimmy, the main character in my book The Sunset Rises: A 1990s Romantic Comedy, sounded like a simp, I got defensive. I shouldn’t have gotten defensive. Jimmy is a fictional character. Even so, my brain churned out an immediate response:
“Oh yeah? Your mom says YOU’RE a simp.”
No, I didn’t say that, but I thought it. I don’t know my coworker well enough to go straight to bringing up his mom. He might not understand. I’m almost 60 years old; I’m probably older than my coworker’s mom. Sometimes men in their twenties don’t understand why I say things about their moms. I’ve had to explain it a few times. If anything, I’m probably lucky that I haven’t been punched out.
Anyway, I had been explaining the premise of my novel The Sunset Rises: A 1990s Romantic Comedy to a couple guys at work, and that’s why my main character was insulted. I’m pretty sure ‘simp’ was an insult. “Simp’ is a relatively new term, though, so I’m not 100% certain. Men didn’t use the word ‘simp’ when I was in my twenties. We had words like ‘whipped’ or ‘pup’ or ‘whipped pup,’ and in some cases ‘wussy.’ I was pretty sure a ‘simp’ was just a guy who was ‘whipped.’
‘Simp’ should be an easy word to figure out, even for a guy my age. The word ‘simp’ sounds like ‘wimp.’ ‘Simp’ is also a short version of ‘simple.’ The internet definition of ‘simp’ (because the internet always gets this stuff right) is “is an internet slang term describing someone who shows excessive sympathy and attention toward another person, typically to someone who does not reciprocate the same feelings, in pursuit of affection or a sexual relationship.”
Yeah…’whipped’… but worse.
My first reaction is that Jimmy is not a simp because Jimmy actually has some romantic success with women. Most simps (from what I understand) don’t get positive female attention unless they give up way too much first, and even then, it’s not guaranteed. Simps (from what I understand) will do anything they can to get positive attention from women in general and are willing to get bossed around or embarrassed in public just to (temporarily) keep a woman.
Jimmy is ‘whipped’ because he has boundary issues like this only with Valerie, the female ‘luuuvvv’ interest, not with women in general. I wanted The Sunset Rises: A 1990s Romantic Comedy to show the dangers of infatuation, and even though the infatuated character in my novel is male, women fall for infatuation too, so most readers should be able to relate to Jimmy in some way.
Infatuation has a horrible effect on people in both genders. Men, when infatuated, will often spend all their money on a woman or murder somebody. Women, when infatuated, will often sleep with the guy right away and yearn for him for eternity when he moves on a couple hours later. Either way, those who are infatuated give up their boundaries far too easily.
Infatuation, no matter what the modern slang for it is, makes both men and women make bad decisions, but it can make for great stories. This distinction, however, might be too precise to discuss with my much younger coworker. Next time, I’ll just talk about his mom.
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A grammar-obsessed English teacher falls in ‘luuuvvv’ but discovers how chaotic and dangerous ‘luuuvvv’ can be.
The Sunset Rises: A 1990s Romantic Comedy
Get a signed copy of my one and only novel, The Sunset Rises: A 1990s Romantic Comedy. Free delivery in the United States!
$10.00
Or you can buy a copy here on Amazon!
Not sure? Read a sample chapter of The Sunset Rises: A 1990s Romantic Comedy.
I can’t believe how poorly my older brother treated the original copies of his 1979 comic strip “Calloway the Castaway.” Yeah, in his mind, it wasn’t a big deal because it was just a weekly comic strip in a local paper, but still. My older brother put a lot of details into some of these panels, far more details than most cartoonists put into their dailies. These strips should have been secured and protected, not just thrown into a box.
At least now I’ve immortalized his work for a while by putting it on my blog. The internet is forever… well, at least until it gets shut down, it’s forever.
For more context, go to The Lost Adventures of “Calloway the Castaway” Episode 1!
And come back next week for The Lost Adventures of “Calloway the Castaway” Episode 18.
This is one of the few “Calloway the Castaway” strips where Calloway doesn’t make an appearance. Even though I’ve read these comic strips several times, I still know the names of only two characters, Calloway and Doc. I know there’s a Lew. The guy with the microphone might be Lew. I could check another strip for verification, or I could just ask my older brother.
I don’t know if my older brother would remember either. He drew these for our local weekly newspaper in 1979. For us, that was a long time ago.
For more context, go to The Lost Adventures of “Calloway the Castaway” Episode 1!
And come back next week for The Lost Adventures of “Calloway the Castaway” Episode 18 .
When I stepped into the classroom as a first-year teacher in 1989, I knew that my students would have a tough time pronouncing my last name. Public school teachers had always messed it up (unless they’d taught my older brothers years earlier), so I didn’t expect eighth graders to do any better.
My last name is pronounced ‘Shek” but is spelled in a way that doesn’t look anything like that, and through all my years as a student, teachers did a great job mangling it, especially on the first day of school. I won’t get into all the mispronunciations, but supposedly the correct pronunciation of my last name is ‘Shek.’ That’s the way I was taught. I wouldn’t be surprised if that turns out to be wrong, though. So much of what I learned at a young age has turned out to be false that I wouldn’t be shocked if the correct pronunciation of my last name turned out to be something like ‘Skork.’
Of course, my first year of teaching was a borderline disaster, but it wasn’t because of my last name. I don’t even remember my students doing anything wrong with it. They probably did, but mispronunciation of my last name was the least of my worries that year.
Anyway, in the early 1990s, Shaquille O’Neil became a famous basketball player, so my students called me Mr. Shaq, and I went with it. At least the mispronunciation was in reference to a popular athlete. I took it as a compliment. Then in the early 2000s, the movie Shrek was released.
The good news was that Shrek made it very easy to teach students how to pronounce my name correctly: it’s ‘Shrek’ without the ‘r.’ The bad news was that students loved calling me Mr. Shrek. A little patience and a few bathroom denials at the beginning of every school year solved that problem. Still, if I ever go back into teaching, I think I’ll just have my students call me Mr. James.
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Below is the first episode of a blog serial that I wrote in 2012 called “Long Story.” The first episode deals with teachers who had unusual names. Some of those last names were much worse than mine.
LONG STORY: TEACHERS WITH FUNNY LAST NAMES
When I was growing up, I had some teachers with unfortunate last names. In junior high I had a math teacher named Mrs. Butte. She insisted her name was pronounced “Bee-Yute” like the word “beauty,” but she wasn’t attractive at all. If she had been a hot chick with cleavage, we might have pronounced her name correctly. But she wasn’t, so we didn’t.
There was also a social studies teacher named Mr. Dick (and his name was pronounced exactly like it was spelled). Nobody made fun of Mr. Dick. You would think a guy named Mr. Dick would stay out of teaching because of his last name, but nobody ever made fun of him.
Mr. Dick was an old man who had cool tattoos on his arm. He had been teaching for decades, and everybody in town had grown up knowing Mr. Dick (or knowing about him), so nobody thought anything about his name anymore. He was just an old man named Mr. Dick.
There’s no way to prove this, but my junior high school was probably the only one that had a Mrs. Butte and a Mr. Dick.
Then in high school I had an English teacher named Mr. Faggins. Mr. Faggins announced on the first day of school that his name was to be pronounced as “Fay-guns.” I knew my rules of pronunciation and how the double consonant causes the vowel in front of it to have the soft sound, but I was also polite enough not to argue with an adult about how to pronounce the adult’s last name. I’ve always believed that a person should be able to choose how to pronounce his or her name.
Of course, somebody would have to test Mr. Fay-guns.
Continue reading at Long Story: Teachers with Funny Last Names .
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Here’s my ONE novel… A grammar-obsessed English teacher falls in ‘luuuvvv’ but discovers how chaotic and dangerous ‘luuuvvv’ can be.
The Sunset Rises: A 1990s Romantic Comedy
Get a signed copy of my one and only novel, The Sunset Rises: A 1990s Romantic Comedy. Free delivery in the United States!
$15.00
Or you can buy a copy here on Amazon!
Not sure? Read a sample chapter of The Sunset Rises: A 1990s Romantic Comedy.
I haven’t been in a public school classroom in over five years, but sometimes the English teacher reflexes still kick in. When I found this copy of Thongor in the City of Magicians in a used book store and read the cover, my first thought was, “That modifying phrase is in the wrong place.”
Here’s the sentence that caught my attention:
“Thongor battles the satanic power of Zaar’s science and sorcery- armed only with his Valkarthan broadsword.”
I mentally corrected it to the following:
“Thongor, armed only with his Valkarthan broadsword, battles the satanic power of Zaar’s science and sorcery.”
Yeah, the sentence on the cover is more dramatic, and that’s what’ mattered most ‘s important to the book publishers. I know this stuff doesn’t really matter. I know nobody reads that sentence and thinks that the Valkarthan broadsword belongs to the sorcery. Everybody who reads that sentence knows that the ‘his’ refers to Thongor.
Plus, the book came out in 1968, so nobody involved with this book would care right now anyway.
I didn’t tell anybody around me in the store about this ‘error.’ I haven’t mentioned this to my friends or relatives. I’m mentioning it only here. This is my blog. That’s the whole point of having a blog, to talk about stuff that nobody else in my life cares about.
I don’t talk about grammar much in my personal life. I know where it would lead me if I did. I remember what happened whenever I talked about grammar in my classroom when I was a teacher, but I had to do it. It was almost part of the curriculum. I think every year it became less and less part of the curriculum even though nobody in charge would openly admit it.
I bought the book Thongor in the City of Magicians for $3.00. It might not be my favorite kind of barbarian story, but at least the author came up with his own barbarian and didn’t try to make it into a Conan book. A lot of authors like to write Conan stories instead of making up their own barbarian, so I respect Thongor and his Valkarthan broadsword, even if the publisher’s sentence structure might be a little off.
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If you’ve read my book, you might see that I’ve made my own share of mistakes (Aaaaarrrrgh!), so maybe I have no room to talk.
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A grammar-obsessed English teacher falls in ‘luuuvvv’ but discovers how chaotic and dangerous ‘luuuvvv’ can be.
The Sunset Rises: A 1990s Romantic Comedy
Get a signed copy of my one and only novel, The Sunset Rises: A 1990s Romantic Comedy. My handwriting is actually legible, but I’m left-handed, so I might smudge my signature sometimes. Free delivery in the United States!
$20.00
Or you can buy a copy here on Amazon!
Not sure? Read a sample chapter of The Sunset Rises: A 1990s Romantic Comedy.
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And here are more nitpicky English teacher observations:
Bad Sentences in Classic Literature: Jane Eyre
Bad Sentences in Classic Literature: The Great Gatsby
Bad Sentences in Classic Literature: The Scarlet Letter
Bad Sentences in Classic Literature: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
Bad Sentences in Classic Literature: Great Expectations
Dysfunctional Literacy 