Stone Soup by Jan Eliot for September 15, 2009

Well, she should get points for having Fidanque filed away in her subconscious somewhere; that’s pretty obscure. (Google is our friend.)

A true Peppermint Patty moment.

Not that obscure- I knew who Dave Fidanque is. Jan Eliot lives in Eugene OR. Dave is married to Kitty Piercy, the Eugene mayor. He’s also the head of the ACLU in Oregon.

The humor is proportional to the inverse square of the distance from Oregon. By the time it gets to Pennsylvania it’s gone.

Not teachers’ humour after Holly’s answers pschearer; that has a permanent value of ln(0) (aka negative infinity).

Ask her if she knows what Silas Marner is about. Isn’t that more important than who wrote it? I don’t remember who wrote it but I remember all the kids hated that story but me. I thought it was a wonderful story and I still remember it all these years later though I don’t remember who wrote it.

I never heard of Silas Marner, don’t have the foggiest idea what it even means.

Mary Anne Evans (aka George Eliot)

I love to read but hated being told what to read (and worse, at what rate of speed to read it). Result 19th century stories left such a bad taste it was decades before I would touch Austen (whom I now love) and Dickens Eliot et al I still have no interest in reading ever again. My kids inherited the gene for reading anything and everything, signs labels on cereal boxes…and how to keep from giving away in English class that they already read the entire book as the class discusses chapter 2. Sadly they have had the modern classics of children’s lit spoiled for them by required reading.

Maybe this year Holly will do better. With teachers catching students who loose interest asking them question hopefully will make each student more alert and ready to answer better students with better grades. Not just select few.

I was the same way. I would finish the book in two days. After a while, my english teachers would start having other books lined up for me to read. I earned lots of extra credit tha way.

slug_queen: If Jan Eliot knows who Dave Fidanque is and Holly knows who Dave Fidanque is (?), then why doesn’t the teacher know who Dave Fidanque is. Guess it wouldn’t really be funny to anybody if she did know.

Harebell – I would have killed to be able to read Austen, Dickens or even Silas Marner for English class. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Anyone who was ever been forced to read her! A Virginia Woolf teaparty scene moves slower than a Mary Worth plotline. Fifty pages later the protagonist has finally put the lump of sugar into the tea. The bad news is the protagonist takes two lumps!

I don’t t know what it is about American reading/English programs, but they all seemed designed to suck the life out reading and then they can’t understand why the kids don’t or can’t read.

Hey Slug_Queen - does Ann Fidanque know that her husband is married to Kitty Piercy? He is the ACLU head in Oregon, but NOT married to the Eugene mayor.

I am NOT Dave Fidanque, nor am I married to Ann nor Kitty. I am also not the head of the ACLU, and cannot abide Virginia Woolf - even her “famous” quotes are boring. All clear now?

When I was told to read a novel, it would be finished in a day or less. I was taught to read at 35 months old and speed read in the 4th grade at a special education school. I can still read at least a novel a day, even if it’s 500+ pages.

This comic strip is presented by authority of the office of the commissioner of Major League Baseball. It may not be reproduced or retransmitted in any form, & the accounts & descriptions of this strip may not be disseminated without expressed written consent.

Always wanted to write that

LOL

If they had let me read Jane Austen in school I would’ve been in 7th heaven. As it was I didn’t read any of her books til much later and then I devoured all of them. Imagine getting to read Pride and Prejudice and getting graded on it instead of some of those boring Hemingway novels.

I remember reading Steinbeck’s East of Eden and Harrison’s West of Eden series at the same time, one for English class, the other for personal enjoyment. I always thought Science Fiction was badly under-represented in the school curriculum, and what little they did have was really bad.

As to the comic, apparently none of the rest of the class was paying attention either, since the teacher asked a question and nobody else seems to know the answer…

She’d know who got called on if she was awake.