Five Comic Strips to See Me Through the New Year Ahead (and maybe you, too)
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So… it’s almost 2024. Our politics have seldom been so fraught and, frankly, so dangerous. Our country has seldom been so polarized. Education is part of the polarization, with some of us trying to preserve public schools as a cornerstone of our democracy even as we try to save them from becoming testing and standardization centers – and others of us seeing public schools as evil liberal indoctrination centers. (Which they are not, generally, unless you think getting student to appreciate others’ points of view is indoctrination, which it is not.)
Censorship runs rampant. Micromanaging of teachers keeps squeezing us like the trash compactor in Star Wars. Nearly every issue we might discuss in class is now too controversial to discuss. Higher education is under attack as well.
Wishes of Happy New Year aside, this coming year is easy to dread. So I need some ideas to hold on to as we go forward.
Fortunately, I have five cartoons framed in my “desk corner” of my classroom to help see me through. I thought I might share them with the rest of you. Only one of them is mine. Comic strips? someone might say? How could five comic strips help you deal with life? Well, I’ll explain.
The first is from Gary Larson’s The Far Side. Of his many strips set in hell, this one is my favorite:
It seems like a lot of people want to make teachers’ jobs a living hell. They micromanage us with scripted curriculum, curriculum maps, and pacing guides. They overload our classes. They overtest our students, then label us with VAM scores based on the results. They call us lazy, indoctrinators, groomers, and pedophiles. But here’s the deal: I haven’t let them get to me. Because I love teaching. I just keep on doing what I do. If l let them make me miserable, they win. So I no longer allow them to make me miserable. Teaching my way and enjoying my job is not only the best way to resist what’s going on, it’s also the best way for me to be happy, which brings me to comic strip number 2:
Of many favorite Peanuts strips, I believe this is my favorite. It may seem a bit glib at first, but I remind myself that my goal should be well-being and happiness for myself, my family, and for my students. It’s so easy to get confused about this. We think our goal is higher test scores, higher graduation rates, higher GPA’s. We think our goal is to make kids college and career ready, to get them ready for the job market, to make them into marketable human capital. And yes, I know my students will need to find jobs or create jobs for themselves. But in the end, all of what we strive for should be in the name of human flourishing, human well-being, human goodness. I have seen people have the grades, the GPAs, the scores, and later the jobs, the promotions, and the six-digit paychecks, and still be not only unhappy, but not necessarily nice people. I remind myself every day that I have many things to be grateful for, and if I keep whistling away like the guy in hell (see strip one), I stand a chance of being outrageously happy, and maybe pass some of that happiness on to my students. Being gloomy does not make the world, dark as it is, any lighter. It just adds more gloom. Here’s a good article to remind us all of that: “The Happiness Guilt Trap.”
We don’t have to wait for things to get better to decide to be happy. Which brings me to strip three, from Stephen Pastis’s Pearl’s Before Swine:
Basically this is the old idea of “Be Proactive.” Stephen Covey introduced me to this idea, but he was introduced to it by Holocaust survivor Victor Frankl. If I’m going to try to be happy and pass that happiness on, I need to use the one real super power I have at my disposal: to control my reactions to events. I’m not saying this is easy, but making my well-being and happiness dependent one what’s happening in the world around me is become a marionette, not a human being. If what happens around me controls my mood and my levels of well-being, I become a passive puppet, controlled by forces beyond my control. When I put my well being in the hands of the events happening in the world, closeup or far away, I find I obsess over all that is wrong, and miss all the things that are going well. I obsess over what’s awful and fail to notice the goodness, wonder, and awe in the world around me. Which brings me to comic strip four, the final Calvin and Hobbes:
I took a walk tonight at sunset, and the sunset that lit up my chilly route was a dazzling, nuanced, and beautiful thing. I drank it in. We all need to do that more often. Earlier this year I read the book Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life by Dacher Keltner. Allowing ourselves to feel awe, to feel aware of the world as a magical place, is one of those things that is good for our well-being (see comic strip two above). I want to remind myself to find opportunities for awe every single day. Sometimes we find it in nature, sometimes in art, sometimes in what Keltner calls Moral Beauty – good deeds in weary world, as Willy Wonka said, quoting Shakespeare in the Merchant of Venice. If the news turns hopeless, I’ll go take a walk, or take in (or make) some good art, which can include a favorite movie or book. Which brings us to the last comic strip, one of mine, drawn in 2021 at the height of the pandemic:
This was a therapy strip. I needed to remind myself why I really like my favorite Sci-Fi franchises, beyond the cool gadgets, fun characters, visually interesting settings, and dazzling special effects: they are models of how to have hope, how to engage in life.
So whenever next year finds me feeling like I’m pushing a wheelbarrow through hell, feeling unhappy, feeling like things aren’t getting any better, feeling like I’ve lost my sense of wonder, or feeling like the bad guys are winning, there is an emergency kit on hand for me to break open: five comic strips to help me find some perspective.
And how they’re here for you, too.
Happy New Year!