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.
3 x 5 Banner for my classroom next year
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.
My daughter Sera came home for a visit this week. Yes, it was a visit. She’s 20 now, and lives in Indianapolis while she goes to Purdue, majoring in mechanical engineering. She stayed in Indianapolis this summer, subletting from an intermational student while she does an internship at Glassboard. She had this week off, and is flying to California to spend a weekend there with friends.
It’s hard.
It’s hard to be a parent who did their job well. She’s independent, confident, competent, and brilliant. She loves us, but she doesn’t need us; not really. Yes, we pay for school, but that was always the plan. She pays for a lot of her living expenses, and her travel. This is her second trip to California this year. She never asks for anything.
It’s hard.
The energy in our house changes completely when she’s home. Her things are on the bathroom counter, a reminder that our family is complete under the same roof once more.
When she said goodbye a few minutes ago after packing up her car, I sat on the edge of my bed, holding back tears. It was the same way when we dropped her off at school two years ago in August. I don’t think it’s ever going to get easier. My wife and I rely on the saying, “Don’t cry because it’s over. Be happy it happened.” Every single day, we tell stories to each other about raising Sera. We send each other Facebook memories. Occasionally we peek in her bedroom.
It’s hard.
Her life is an absolute joy to witness, and thank goodness for instananeous communication. I love seeing projects she works on (the ones not covered by NDA, of course), and photos of the places she goes, and I just think to myself, this is how we raised her. We gave her the skills to live this life. We can’t be sad that she’s doing it right.
It’s hard.
It’s a few hours later now, and I just checked her progress on Life360. She’s almost back at her apartment. I don’t stalk her during normal life, but I watch her when she travels. I want to know that she arrives safely. In a few days, life will return to our new empty-nest normal, and we’ll start looking forward to seeing her just before school starts again. But for now…
One of the favorite characters I played in Champions was Silverwing. When I first joined the Aegis campaign right out of college, with Scott Burnham running, I initially played a speedster, which Scott wrote up for me. Scott and I had been friends while I was in college but I didn’t have the time to devote to gaming that he did. I had my studies to concentrate on. Scott ran DC Heroes for us when our little gaming group could get together, and he often playtested his scenarios on our little group before he ran them against his group down in South Bend. Once I graduated in June 1987, I got to sit in on an Aegis game, but there was no room for me as a player. As fate would have it, however, Scott was in a major car accident that summer and was in traction for a month, having broken his hip. He also had permanent nerve damage in his ankle and couldn’t move his foot up and down on the accelerator of a car. When he was well enough to travel, he asked me to drive him to South Bend every Sunday, and they made the concession to let me play since I was useful to the person running their games.
I didn’t really know much about Champions at the time, having only played once before, early on in college. But after two lackluster performances, I knew I didn’t like my speedster and wanted to try something else. At the time I was living in my grandmother’s spare upstairs room and substitute teaching for a teacher on maternity leave in Allegan. My evenings were pretty free. So, I dug into the Champions books to learn what I could about what I was doing wrong. I knew I wanted to play someone fast, someone with martial arts skill and a shield, Captain America being one of my favorite Marvel characters; and Alpha Flight was a popular book at the time, so the flying battlesuit sounded like a fun idea, too. And so I wrapped my patriotic character up in Honolulu blue and silver like my Detroit Lions and off we went.
I really got into playing Champions. I mean really got into it. I bought a game bag in my character’s colors, with matching 12-sided dice. I customized a metal miniature of Vortex, the flying character from The Elementals, and glued a triangular shield on his arm that I cut away from a D&D miniature, and painted it.
By the time January 1988 rolled around, I started tracking my experience points on a piece of graph paper. I also made notes of what or who we faced that week in the game, which later came in handy when I wrote adventure recaps. Just today, I found those experience point trackers in my character folder. I played Silverwing until June 1990.
This progression of character sheets shows not only the changes in the character over time, but also the changes in art styles and even game systems, as the final character sheet is in 4th Edition Champions with the hero creation software.
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.
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!
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.
