Return to Riverdale

You know, I haven't told my colleagues about this blog yet, and I don't know if they would want me to refer to the school by name, so I should probably come up with an alias. Since this is comic book class, I should use something comics-related. I'll go with the most famous school in American comics, Riverdale High.

So I went to Riverdale today and set up my classroom. It took about three hours. I'm happy with how it looks, particularly the bulletin board collage (I always cover one small bulleting board with random pictures I've accumulated over the years.) Loving Wife tells me that, since I'm teaching a comic book class, I should put my giant Crisis on Infinite Earths poster up in the classroom. I've got pictures of Superman and Captain America up but, I dunno, that Crisis poster is 65" x 28". That is a lot of space for one poster, particularly one that really undercuts that whole "there's more to comics than super-heroes" argument I'm going to be making.

I've still got to figure out the details of the first week's lesson plans, and some stuff like that, but I'm much farther along than I was this time last year. The last days of summer are usually a desperate scramble as I struggle to make the transition back into teaching. Creating this blog, and thinking through the details of this class, made the transition much smoother this year.

After writing about this class for the last few weeks, I'm feeling excited and optimistic about actually teaching it. Will my optimism survive contact with the students? Only time will tell. They say that students can sense when a teacher is genuinely enthusiastic about the material, and there is not much I am more enthusiastic about than comics.

Here's something students have to look forward to in the first week:

(from The Portable Frank, by Jim Woodring)