I’ve been thinking. I know, I guess I’d better have been thinking because I sure as heck haven’t been posting anything here in a while. A few years ago, one of my friends, Scott Burnham, passed away. I met Scott when I was in college. I had just bought the DC Heroes Roleplaying Game, and we wanted to play, but had no one to run for us. We didn’t know how to run games, so we went to the college gaming group and started recruiting. Scott volunteered. Over the years, I played in a number of Scott’s games and he in mine. And when he passed away, our local comic book store purchased his original art, comics, and gaming materials in the estate sale. They told me, because there were quite a few pieces that I had done among the collection. I’m told this one was his favorite:
Psiren
Now, don’t get all judgy. Scott was a lonely guy. I know why, but that’s not my story to tell. And now that he’s gone, it doesn’t really matter. We had a couple of fallings out over the years, but I still considered him my friend. Anyway, the owner of the store didn’t want to spend the time going through the box because most of the artworks was of Scott’s own characters and the market wasn’t very good for something like that. So, I was given the opportunity to buy all of his art pieces and non-book gaming stuff, character sheets and all for $300. I didn’t really have $300 to spend at the time, but I did it anyway, with the thought that I could probably sell enough from it to at least break even on the deal. And I’d have a lot of my artwork back that I did decades ago.
As it turned out, among the pile in the box, and that’s exactly what it was–a pile in a box, I found this piece:
Dragon by Stan Sakai
I promptly sold this drawing on Ebay for $300 and the bargain was made. Anything else I got from the collection was gravy and I had all my artwork back. I spent some time going through the pile. And I found some gems, and some not-gems. One of the fun drawings I found was this one:
Psiren, by George Perez
And where did I find it? Inside a sheet protector with character sheets for Psiren! There were dozens and dozens of character sheets for Champions in the box, and as I sorted through them, I remembered encountering most of the bad guys in there, and some of the heroes, too. Then it occurred to me that with all of the myriad characters I’ve created, I don’t want them to end up in a pile in a box. So, I am creating The Masquerade Files.
Back in the early 90s, I belonged to a Champions amateur press alliance (APA) called The Clobberin’ Times, and my zine was called Of Masks and Men. So, every two months, I would put at least one character picture and their background in, Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe/Who’s Who style, and sometimes I would include a character sheet.
Abattoir. Hey, the 90s were dark!
Yes, that is indeed a dot-matrix printer page from my Tandy DMP-107, and I wrote it on a Tandy 1000 SL2! Radio Shack at its finest!
With today’s technology, I can do a little better than that!
Boy, the 90s were a dark time!
Now, Abattoir has an interesting history. I was teaching at Lew Wallace High School in Gary, and I had a Vietnamese student who did, indeed, get suspended for getting jumped because the vice principal assumed that, being Asian, he knew Kung Fu or something. I stared at him, dumbfounded. That part of the story is absolutely true. To my knowledge, he was not recruited by an evil corporation and was not experimented on. But then again, it’s been a long time.
Abattoir was the main villain in a Clobberin’ Times gathering at Chicago Comicon one year. A whole bunch of us midwesterners played our main characters in one big game. As was our habit at the time, there was a vote at the end of the game for who played their character best, and that person won the original art, which is seen in the profile box. . Moving forward I will be taking good, long looks at some (or all, if I live long enough) of the characters I’ve created for gaming, comics, and just fun, and I’ll be assembling them all into one big file. I’ve had to go back and relearn InDesign all over again to make the template, but I think I have a handle on it now.
The last book I had read was The Martian, by Andy Weir, and while I liked the movie very much, I loved the book even more. Andy Weir is not afraid to get nerdy and lay out some serious math and I’m here for it. While I started thinking about reading a book by another favorite author, Scott Turow, some of my friends urged me to read another Weir book, Project Hail Mary, and I am so glad I did. I was warned to avoid the spoilers in the movie trailer that is out now, and I’m relieved that I did so. Because Project Hail Mary unfolds like a flower. It begins with the Amnesiac Hero trope, but it serves the book well as the protagonist’s (no, I’m not even going to tell you his name) story is told in parallel, with a series of flashbacks filling in the gaps as his memory returns…slowly.
I honestly can’t tell you too much about this book without spoiling it. But I will say this: If you liked The Martian, you will love Project Hail Mary. I love the problem solving, the humanity of the protagonist, flawed though he may be, and a satisfying conclusion that didn’t feel rushed, a trait that is more and more common these days. Oh, and the audiobook reader, Ray Porter? He kills it. Great job.
Three days preparing for students to start school. Three days.
Sounds like a lot, doesn’t it? It isn’t. I’m just glad I went in last week to get started because I’m still not done. On Monday, all one thousand or so of us teachers congregated in the auditorium at the high school and listened to the superintendent talk for two hours. Well, I assume someone listened to him. I didn’t. I tried to listen but he couldn’t figure out how to talk into the microphone he clipped on. He walked around, gesticulated a lot, and from his tone, I think he was excited. But I couldn’t make out much of what he said. Everyone who spoke into the microphone at the podium were crystal clear. Unfortunately, that portion of the program was only about 20 minutes.
After catching a ride with my principal back to my school ( I hitched a ride there with my friend and neighbor Amber) I ate my lunch and had a whole 30 minutes to continue to unpack and situate my room, before–aw, you guessed. A staff meeting.Two and a half hours of presentation and information overload. After 90 minutes, it was all just bouncing off. Fortunately they gave us all a digital copy of the presentation with links to the important documents. The hard wooden furniture in B128 used to be in the library. I recognized it right away. It did quite a number on my back after two and a half hours. The library, on the other hand, has some nice, comfortable chairs. Probably not enough to seat the entire staff, though. At the end of the meeting, I got to see one of my old students who is now an assistant principal. That doesnt’ seem quite possible, but there you go.
By the end of the meeting, I had about an hour to work in my classroom. I was beat.
On the second day, we began with–aw, come on, you’re too good at this game–a meeting. A training, really, in how to use our new textbooks. The school system hasn’t adopted a math text in, let me count here, 16 years. But now we are using RevealMath, which includes both consumables and digital content. They are allegedly aligned with Indiana standards, but my very first search proved that wrong. Prime factorization is kind of my thing. My entire Solution Squad book starts out with prime numbers, then moves on to prime factorization, then solving proportions with simplifying ratios, which is done with prime factorization. It’s incredibly useful. Well, in Indiana, it’s a 7th grade standard, but it was nowhere to be found in the textbook that we are being given. It’s part of the 6th grade course. And we were told that we were only allowed access to the coursework that we actually teach, so the 6th grade book is not available to me, as I teach 7th and 8th grade. Now, you might think that something like that would upset me, but it does not. That just means I get to use my Solution Squad materials! It’s actually cause for celebration. What did make me a little angry, though, is that the filter I applied for my search was by Indiana standard, and lo and behold, it’s the old standards, not the 2023 ones. For a big company like McGraw-Hill, that’s just lame. At least I got some time in my rom after lunch.
The third day began with–no, you really don’t have to guess–a meeting. We had a math department meeting to talk about scope and sequence, distribution of the new books (which hadn’t even arrived yet), and who was teaching what courses. It was necessary to have, but holy moley, so many meetings. I would love to say that I spent the rest of the day preparing, but the books came in around lunchtime, and after I devoured my steak burriito and Mexican Coke from Ricky’s Taqueria (the best little hole in the wall in all of Elkhart), I hauled 200 books in two loads on my cart up from the library. I got all four bulletin boards done, but there’s a pile of totes in my room that have nowhere to go.
I probably should mention that there is not one cubic inch of storage available in my classroom. The teacher who had my room last year passed away from cancer, toward the end of the year, and all of her stuff is still in the cabinets. They’re still trying to figure out what to do with all of it. In the meantime, I’ll just stack my totes in a corner.
I would normally have been done with everything by now, but with all the heavy physical stuff, my back was warning me to slow down and take breaks. Getting older sometimes isn’t that much fun.
The kids are coming today, and I can’t wait to meet them!
The rest of my life. It’s such an odd phrase. But having turned 60 years old, I have to really start considering that what time I have left is limited. My dad died at 65, my mom at 72; both had cancer. Three of my 4 grandparents had cancer. One died at 53 two at 69, and one at 85. Just looking at the math, I may not have a whole lot of time left. So how do I use it? Retirement didn’t stick. I was bored silly. I was so bored, that one month, I wrote a novel. 60,000 words in a month. And I was still bored. Every morning I would do all the puzzles that the New York Times had to offer then I would write all day. It still didn’t give me the mental stimulation that I needed.
Since going back to teaching full time I have found the stimulation that I was looking for. Last year, however, was not ideal. I was teaching students who had failed algebra up to five times. They were not exactly inspired to learn. My ego told me I could make a difference in their lives and for a very few I was successful. But it was frustrating beyond words to meet such resistance from students who didn’t feel they could improve their lives. When the opportunity came to return to teaching middle school I jumped at it. I am a middle school teacher. Have been given the chance to return to Pierre Moran Middle School, well that was just icing on the cake.
I never stopped learning new things. That’s one of the things I can be proud of in my life. In trying to develop a yearlong escape room, more or less. I’ve found tools that have helped me immensely in being productive: ChatGPT and Canva. If I had had these tools while I was working on Solution Squad, my life would have been so much easier. The ability to create learning materials based on my comic stories has been made incredibly easier. I can now produce posters worksheets buttons everything at the touch of a button using Canva. ChatGPT helps me to align my work with Indiana math standards which have changed in the past two years. Who knows why they keep changing things the way they do? But they do and I just have to play along.
One of the mistakes I made when working on Solution Squad was thinking that all math teachers had the same ability that I do to be able to find math in every single instance of any subject. It was such a niche project that the crossover between math teachers and comic book lovers was too small to make it financially viable. So, I’m not trying to do that anymore. The work that I’m doing now is purely for my benefit. People may admire my creativity but I’m not doing it for the masses or to make money. I’m doing it for me. I want to see if I can be the quality teacher that I was 10 years ago.
My wife often says that I have to have a project. I always have to have something long term that I’m working on to keep myself occupied. Now that I have the tools available to me that I wish I’d always had, I’m going to make the class the best I possibly can. I’m going to use graphic novels, comic books, and popular culture and I’m going to make a math class that kids will remember.
The big question is, how long can I keep this up? If I enjoy it? Indefinitely. In seven years, I can collect Social Security at my full retirement age I don’t feel like my health will stop me but possibly my hearing will be the issue. I already have trouble hearing people in conversation and have to read lips in addition to having hearing aids, so I guess I’ll let that determine when I’m done. But I would honestly enjoy teaching for the rest of my life if the kids match my creative energy like the middle school kids in my past did.
I’m returning after a 10-year absence to Pierre Moran Middle School in Elkhart Indiana. I’ll be teaching 7th grade and possibly an eighth grade class and I’m really looking forward to being back with 12, 13, and 14-year olds that’s really where I belong. I’ll be honest I really haven’t felt like much of a teacher in the 10 years since I was pulled from Pierre Moran mid-year to join the staff at Northside Middle School completely against my will. I had spent 18 1/2 years at Pierre Moran and I had already had the children of some of my children. I was part of the community. I was a leader. I had been on virtually every committee that the school had and chaired most of them at one time or another. The hows and whys of it don’t matter anymore; the important thing is that I’m back.
You wouldn’t think that at age 60 that I had anything to prove. But I do–to myself. When I left Pierre Moran 10 years ago I was at the top of my game. I was the best teacher I had ever been. Everything was rolling in the right direction and it’s never been the same since. I want to see if I can get back to that level of expertise and skill and I want to do more. I want to be the example that other people follow. With that in mind I came up with a crazy idea to create a fictional school within a school a superhero school if you will and the students in my classes will be superheroes in training. Using ChatGPT to provide graphics and Canva to provide the ability to present, I’m going to introduce my students a new way of immersing in a fictional world while learning math at the same time. I’m not sure it’s ever been done before but I’m going to do it. Here’s my first presentation.
