Was not expecting today’s strip to be a standalone gag, but I guess we should be grateful for some respite from Bull’s swan song. And it’s been a while since my high school band days, but we didn’t start practicing Christmas music until football season was almost over. Speaking of football, we’ll get back to Bull’s plight on Monday; the good news is that your guide will be Epicus Doomus!
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As usual, the Sunday strip wasn’t available for preview. Normally I would try to tough it out till midnight, just to make sure whatever horrors Sunday brings are properly commented on. However, the strain of trying to find amusement in drying paint has finally broken me, and I’ve come down with the Westview flu. Not as deadly as the Spanish flu, maybe, but virulent in it’s ability to sap me of energy, leaving me with a headache, and slightly nauseous. So pretty much what you would expect after spending two weeks with Les Moore.
Here’s hoping that it’s not able to be transmitted through the interwebs, because Beckoning Chasm is taking over for me tomorrow, and I’d hate to think I had contaminated the controls.
Goodnight, and Good Luck.
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Now I am really really disappointed we didn’t get to see any of this water balloon competition. Because it sounds like it was a no-holds-barred water war waged both inside and outside the school. Can you imagine the water damage? Even if they were barred from classrooms and computer labs, all those corkboards and vaguely inspirational posters on the walls are toast. And those tile floors would have gotten dangerously slippery, I imagine everyone who participated has bruised tailbones and skinned knees.
But I’m guessing there isn’t anything in the student handbook preventing the teachers from running through the halls with firehoses, water pistols, and, balloons. Nate’s hands were tied.
Why is Les still grilling hotdogs? We see food in front of these people, so they’ve mostly all gotten all they were going to eat already. Unless there’s going to be a hotdog eating contest later. Billytheskink was joking at the beginning of the week about Dinkle being able to eat a banana sideways. Now I’m picturing him shoving hotdog after hotdog into his mouth sideways like a machine, lips closing over his entire fist down to the wrist every time and sucking the digits clean.
But more likely Les just doesn’t want to listen to anyone elses’ speechifying.
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First of all, there is an absolute horror show of a human in the background. A literal dickhead emerging from a shirt made of pubes. The guy is smug as shit too. No doubt having just eaten an entire plate of the grilled processed meat tubes that he has descended from in some kind of twisted Westviewian evolution.
Does Westview grade on the curve? That’s a horrific thought. Because while some teacher claim that pretending that the smartest kid’s 85% correct on the test is the new 100% is ‘grading on the curve’, what it really means is the draconian application of the bell curve to the entire class. Every student ranked, in direct competition with the other students for the limited number of A’s, 40% of students doomed to C’s regardless of what actual percentage of the material they got correct. All your A or B tells you is that in Mrs. McGiggins 2005 Fall semester of Pre-Calculus you did better than 15 other people.
My junior year of high school, the calculus teacher was gone the entire year on maternity leave. For the first semester, they gave the advanced math students taking precalc and calc a teacher they had previously relegated to teaching remedial general math because she was so inept, despite the fact she was technically qualified. Because of her I never learned the difference between cosine and cosign.
When the most gifted kids in the school started struggling and complaining to their parents, the principal had the audacity to come to the class, pull out a bell curve and try to explain to us that, really, most of us SHOULD be getting C’s in the class.
I shot my hand right up and explained to the class that ‘the bell curve’ was both old-fashioned and unfair. We were supposed to be graded on the percentage of the material we got right, not in competition with other students for limited number of A’s. The fact that most of us were getting C’s meant that, as a class, we were understanding barely half of what we were being tested on. He fumbled around for a bit, but didn’t really have a good response. He was talking to the smartest kids in the school, and our GPA’s, and thus our college prospects, were on the line.
They pulled an old math teacher out of retirement for the next semester.
I remember the impotent frustration, the despair, and the eventual fatalistic resignation that we, as a class, felt that semester. So many of us just gave up trying. There was no reason to attempt to succeed on our own, because that would only hurt our classmates by driving up expectations. So most of us sat through every day of math class that semester, silent, sullen, and unresponsive.
What I’m saying is, I’m guessing that Westview grades on a curve.
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I know one way the school can save money. If you’re having a guy who’s been retired for over a decade come in and do a significant part of your job for you because you’re too busy with other stuff to do it, then you probably shouldn’t have that job anymore.
So, Becky is so busy trying to steal money designated for the football team that she can’t oversee practices? What is she doing in that time? Emailing the school board? While she’s actually on the clock for her job? That seems bad.
Dinkle commenting about returning to band land is one of the funniest things in this strip in years. He has never left. He has no life outside of band. Near as I can tell he spends every day lurking behind Becky. And the only times he’s not doing that he’s writing biographies about band.
For a guy who went pretty much deaf long ago, being able to differentiate between “raising” and “raiding” is pretty damn impressive. Far, far less impressive is the fact that the “band room” is crappily taped to the inside of the door. Rather than the outside where it would actually do any good.
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Boy, the folks running the OMEA are damned efficient! Compare the background of yesterday’s strip to today’s. They’ve managed to put up a huge number of booths and banners in a matter of seconds! Yesterday’s box of crap at the far right has been expanded into a nicely arranged table. Talk about can-do! Imagine how many band mattresses those guys could sell. Probably hundreds in just an hour. Oh, wait–they’d have to sell them in Westview, wouldn’t they. Well, they could probably sell at least one, right? And maybe come back alive, most of them? Sorry for sending you guys into that city–and I already knew it was infested with zombies, too. My bad, guys. Oops. Won’t happen again, you have my word.
On the other hand, this conference has been going on for several days, and they’re only just now getting around to setting up these booths. (Perhaps one of these booths was the one that had pizza! Mystery solved.) Okay, so…they’re very efficient once they start, but also lazy and unmotivated to start on their own. Well, no one will ever fault this strip for being too consistent.
As for this stupid app, weren’t they championing something similar a few years ago that could keep track of trombone sections? Yesterday they were dismissive of this thing, but throw in candy sales and their eyes goggle. Becky even gets to shove her pinned sleeve into frame, she’s so excited.
*Shrug.* As mentioned, no one will ever fault this strip for being too consistent. “Hey, Batiuk, loosen up! You don’t have to remember all the details, like things that have already happened, last names, and stuff like that. It makes you look like a beady-eyed nitpicker. You don’t want to look like a beady-eyed nitpicker, do you? No one gives awards for that.”
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As February dawns, the first strip of the month is not available for preview, but let’s be honest–Batiuk’s not going to cut away to something different, not when he’s got Dinkle to shove in people’s faces. Those seemingly endless weeks where he craps out those terrible, terrible Claude Barlow witlessisms should be proof of that.
Yesterday, he wailed and moaned that he couldn’t find free food. What could it be today? Perhaps…his ass, with both hands?
I wonder if Beck will get any lines…so far, she’s only spoken on Sunday, and it was, of course, nothing but praise for Dinkle. So, she’s really already played her part. All that’s left is a praise reprise.
(GAH, sorry folks, that was almost Batiukian…surprising how easily one slips back into this stuff…)
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