{"id":580,"date":"2004-01-13T07:07:00","date_gmt":"2004-01-13T11:07:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.pipesdreams.org\/blog\/archives\/580"},"modified":"2011-09-26T22:21:42","modified_gmt":"2011-09-27T02:21:42","slug":"teacher-there-are-things-that-i-dont-want-to-learn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.pipesdreams.org\/blog\/archives\/580","title":{"rendered":"“Teacher! There Are Things, That I Don’t Want to Learn…”"},"content":{"rendered":"

…but there’s virtually nothing I wouldn’t like to try teaching. Except perhaps, hands-on sewage treatment. Maybe glassblowing also, given my notable lack of skill in that field<\/a>. Okay, and fish processing.<\/p>\n

Getting back to my point. Teaching is something I suspect I might be really good at, but never having tried, I can’t be sure. The lack of exertion on my part is probably due to my paralyzing fear of young children (youngsters being the core audience for most teaching). <\/p>\n

My kinderfear was born of the preternatural speed with which little ones pick up knowledge. Their fresh little brains are like flypaper. Nothing is creepier that hyper-intelligent children. Go rent ‘Damien’ or watch ‘7th Heaven’ and tell me if you feel different after. Also, I abhor that any given 6-year-old at the local skating rink can zoom circles around me while I hobble along, clutching the boards for fear of slumping to the icy floor, Bambi-styles. They’re like little wool-covered hornets, or scary Oompaloompas with steel blades strapped to their feet. Ugh!<\/p>\n

Now, adults… adults I can handle. Which is why I spent a silly amount of time last night agonizing over sending an email to the Toronto Women’s Bookstore, offering to teach a class on Women in Comics. I don’t know if they’re crazy enough to go for it, but I whiled away at least an hour speculating about lesson plans, and it was one of the best parts of my day.<\/p>\n

Here is my lengthy testing-the-waters teaching proposal email to the TWB…<\/p>\n

I was intrigued by your open-ended request for suggested class topics. My particular passion is graphic novels and comic books, with a focus on the history\/current state of women working in the field. I’m well-versed in the subject, and have approached it with both an academic rigor learned from my Master’s degree in English Literature at UofT and a personal and professional interest gathered from working as a retailer and alternative\/independent press specialist at the Silver Snail Comic Store on Queen Street. <\/p>\n

There are a number of relevant books on this topic, some of which you might stock at your store. The two seminal publications in the field, from an academic standpoint, are ‘The Great Women Cartoonists’ and ‘The Great Women Superheroes’, both by Trina Robbins (published by Watson-Guptill). Beware! Don’t let the words “cartoon” and “superheroes” betray the richness of the genre – it’s not *all* about busty Amazons flying invisible planes. <\/p>\n

Graphic literature has been expanding into challenging and exciting fields, including autobiography (‘Diary of a Teenage Girl’, Phoebe Gloeckner \/ ‘When I’m Old and Other Stories’, Gabrielle Bell), sexual\/gender studies (‘Bitchy Bitch’, Roberta Gregory), non-fiction\/sociology (‘Mother May I’, Sarrah Young and Willow Dawson’) and speculative fiction (‘Y: the Last Man’, Pia Guerra). In the field of Canadian studies, women have been leaving their mark on the international scene, as seen in the popularity of Quebecois artist Julie Doucet, whose many published works include her early ‘zine ‘Dirty Plotte’, later books ‘My New York Diary’, ‘Long Time Relationship’, and most recently her illustrations in Toronto’s hot new magazine, “The Walrus”. <\/p>\n

By working in the industry and attending a number of trade shows, I’ve had the chance to meet, interview, and become friends with many women working in what has traditionally been (and continues to be) a male-dominated field. I see my involvement in the comics industry as an attempt to make women feel comfortable exploring the sometimes forbidding breadth and depth of this unsung, unreviewed material. Not completely unsung: I should hasten to mention the large internet communities of women artists and readers who have formed some of the best review websites around. ‘Sequential Tart’ (http:\/\/www.sequentialtart.com\/home.shtml) and ‘Friends of Lulu’ (http:\/\/www.friends-lulu.org\/) publish reviews and interviews, host message boards, and sponsor publications and anthologies of women’s work (‘Broad Appeal’).<\/p>\n

I would love the opportunity to share my knowledge of this all-too-marginalized field with others, and I think my passion for the subject matter, familiarity with both guided discussion and lecture-based instruction, and connections within the comic community would make this a successful venture.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

…but there’s virtually nothing I wouldn’t like to try teaching. Except perhaps, hands-on sewage treatment. Maybe glassblowing also, given my notable lack of skill in that field. Okay, and fish processing. Getting back to my point. Teaching is something I suspect I might be really good at, but never having tried, I can’t be sure. […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[17,1296],"class_list":["post-580","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-consciousness","tag-comics","tag-teaching"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pipesdreams.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/580"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pipesdreams.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pipesdreams.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pipesdreams.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pipesdreams.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=580"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.pipesdreams.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/580\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2393,"href":"https:\/\/www.pipesdreams.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/580\/revisions\/2393"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pipesdreams.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=580"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pipesdreams.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=580"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pipesdreams.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=580"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}