Visions
My back may argue against me, but my brain doesn’t. Although I retired over six years ago, I really wasn’t ready to. I may never be. I settled into a boring daily routine of substitute teaching and doing puzzles to keep my brain sharp. I worked on my supposed reitrement hobby, buying, repairing, and selling old Mego action figures, and tried to keep my brain engaged with the world.
It didn’t work.
I got so bored that, three years ago now, I wrote a novel. You’ve heard of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo)? It takes place in November every year. I didn’t join the website or the official group or anything like that. I just read the guidelines, which suggested writing a 50,000 word draft during the month of November and off I went. I wrote 60,000 words in 26 days. Done. Are you ever going to read that novel? No. It was a romance novel set in 1998 and the main characters are two middle school teachers who work in a school very similar to one that shall remain nameless, where very early in my career, many shenanigans were going on. “Any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental” was a complete lie. I just wanted to see if I could do it.
When I gave up, bored, and went back to the classroom full-time, I was not in the best mindset. I started off teaching freshmen, who were feral wolves during COVID and didn’t know how to behave at all. And then I had to transfer to the city’s grade 10-12 building because I was the only one certified to teach most high school classes. That turned out to be even worse. I was saddled with teaching students Algebra I. These were students who had failed Algebra I in eighth grade, and ninth grade, and were now on their third try. With the academic challenges came behavior challenges and by the end of that year, I was ready to walk away again and go mine coal or something.
But this past year, an opening at my old middle school came up, and I found myself not just teaching in a school where I had worked for 18 and a half years previously, but in a classroom I had taught in previously. I was home. And with that change came the return of my best and favorite creation, Solution Squad. Here I was, teaching seventh grade math again, and one of the first standards we were expected to teach was writing the prime factorization of a number using exponents. What else would I use? I had created an entire graphic novel based around prime numbers, prime factorization, simplying fractions, and solving proportions with them. And the target audience was here, right in front of me.
Earlier in the summer, I had used ChatGPT and became familiar with it and Canva as well, and suddenly I was able to make my characters appear in presentations without drawing new images, as described here. And when school let out for the year, I sat down in earnest to see if I could make my kids come to life.
One of the first things I did was to create animation-style turnarounds of each of the characters. And no, this wasn’t a case of simply prompting with words. I have had to refine my prompts at least 100 times to get the results I want. And even then I have to go into Photoshop and adjust the boots of the costumes and make sure the colors were consistent. Generative AI is known to have its own ideas and is not intended to follow specific guidelines. That tool may be coming down the road and when it does, I’ll be all over it. But for now, I’ll work with what I have available.
Now, I’m not taking any work out of the hands of actual artists. I haven’t paid anyone to draw in years, except for the occasional blog banner or profile picture. I’m not going back into the comic book publishing game ever again. I’m doing this for my classroom. Once I got my turnarounds done, I dug through my old Solution Squad papers and found the first page of a comic book story I never finished. It was pencils only, no backgrounds. Here’s what I got back:
All I need to do now is drop these elements onto Canva slides and add letters and balloons. I don’t need to be fancy and use Illustrator. Again, not looking to publish. These 72 dpi images are good enough for Canvas. My digital comics are back in the game!
As opposed to my short period of retirement, where I thought I had to adjust to doing nothing, I have a million things I want to do. I want more comic stories for my kids. I want to try animation. I want to put music to the stories. I want to learn again, and it’s been a while since that’s been true. So, do I feel 90 anymore? Heck no.
I have visions.
