For Better or For Worse by Lynn Johnston for December 02, 2015

Somehow I feel that, no matter how hard Elizabeth tries, she’ll never get that sticker.

Figures of speech need to be taught to that girl.

And Elizabeth eventually became a teacher. Hard to believe!

Funny, same thing happened to me and a friend in my high school creative writing class with short stories. We had the same result. I got A’s in all my other courses. Luckily I only had this teacher for one semester. P.S. My friend is now a successful writer and I’m a musician. lol

Well give her a sticker teach… She did pull up her socks didn’t she??I don’t like spoiler alerts either….

Just think, she will someday be a teacher herself!

I never heard that expression….I always heard, “Pull yourself up by your bootstraps”. I was the type of kid who would have done exactly what Elizabeth is doing. One time, my parents had friends over for a BBQ. They had a daughter my age. She and I were in my room playing cards and she was cursing a blue streak. Later I started to say something about it by accident in front of the grownups. She smacked me before I could get the words out and said, “Shut up! You almost spilled the beans on me!” and me, naive and excessively literal looked around the BBQ area and said, “No I didn’t- the beans are way over there on the table.” Taking it literally. I feel for you, Elizabeth!

This tickled my funny bone when it originally ran and it still does!

I had that situation in high school History — we guys always got “C” on our HW assignments, while the cute girls got “A”. I suspect the teacher (a man) was too lazy to even read the papers, and favored the cute girls for other reasons than the quality of their work.

So my buddy befriended one of the girls, and did the homework with her, word for word the same except for the name at the top and the handwriting. He got “C” and she got “A”. They went to the teacher with it, and he changed the boy’s grade to “F” for cheating.

Then on the multiple-choice final (since the teacher was too lazy to pretend to grade a real test), I got a 96, my buddy got a 93, and the girl got a 78. But she still got an “A” for the course based on her straight-A homework.

Metaphors are wasted on the young and the newcomer.

Teacher in last panel should be flipping backwards with feet in the air to a loud “PLOP!”

When one of my boys was in high school, they suspected the teacher did not actually read the 12 to 15 page themes he assigned. So, we put one together with the first and last pages genuine, but the pages in the middle were a combination of copies from German, Spanish and Turkish books and magazines. It passed.

A survey was done one time, when one university noted that hardly any of their successful alumni had been valedictorians of their classes. So, they went back through their records and noted most of the top alumni had been in the A- to B+ range! Then it became clear what was happening: The A and A+ students had good memories, and thus able to pass tests easily. However, when out in the real world, they were at a loss when new problems came up to be solved.

-Abstaining from rewarding sub-standard performance is not bullying

Elizabeth has been singled out for negative feedback from this teacher since the beginning of her school year. The teacher reprimanded Elizabeth in front of all the other students for chewing her pencil and ‘spreading germs’, although it is likelyi that other kids also did that. It is the kind of thing that young kids do.

The teacher also went out of her way to call attention to how ‘unprepared’ Elizabeth was because she didn’t have pencils with her on her first day (she forgot and left her pencil box at home.) Again, something that was probably also the case for other kids, but we only saw the teacher reprimand Elizabeth.

Now Elizabeth sees everyone else in the class with a sticker. All of these together suggest that it is less likely that she is the only one with so-called ‘sub-standard’ behavior than it is that the teacher has singled her out for mistreatment.

You told her to pull up her socks. She pulled up her socks. Get that sticker ready, Teach!

I’m guessing “You’ll have to pull up your socks” is some sort of obscure figure of speech from a bygone era? I’m not sure how having high socks would help someone work harder, though.

Remember, Elizabeth eventually became a teacher because she finally got a teacher who truly inspired her!

What a lousy teacher she is. A good teacher would actually tell her what she needed to do to improve, not use some obscure idiom that a small child wouldn’t understand.

What a rotten teacher! Who even uses that expression?