This comic brought back memories of my own Mrs. Olsen.
My Mrs. Olsen was my 8th grade history teacher, Mrs. Ryan. Where Mrs. Olsen is a big woman, Mrs. Ryan was frail, bird-like. She was born when Teddy Roosevelt was president, which was impressive even then.
And I was her Caulfield. I suppose I was everybody’s Caulfield growing up, but Mrs. Ryan was having none of it. She was strict and she scared me. And I didn’t have a janitor friend enabling me when I wanted to undermine her authority (not that I’d ever accuse her of being stupid, mind you: just not as clever as I was, of course).
But my unwillingness to get with the program was bad enough. That she hated me was common knowledge.
Instead of writing a paper about comparative religions, I created a board game where the players passed through various religions’ afterlives.
(getting to the comic reference…)
In April, I convinced her to let us have an Anzac Day party during class. Because, you know, it was history. There was cake. There were balloons.
After a while, one of the balloons became the centerpiece of a volleyball game. And in the middle of it, Mrs. Ryan came out from behind her desk and joined us, at one point giving that balloon an impressive spike. Honestly, I wouldn’t have been more shocked if our neighbor’s dog stood on his hind legs and recited Hamlet’s soliloquy.
I’d like to say that I immediately realized that all the assumptions I’d made about Mrs. Ryan were wrong: but I was thirteen. It came later.
I still have that board game. I got an A.
Comics I Don't Understand 
I can’t remember the name of my 9th grade Geography teacher, but he was either thick as a brick or great at challenging the bright kids to formulate their thinking clearly. (This was Junior High in a 6-3-3 system so although we were technically HS Freshmen we were the top grade there and in a way like Seniors.)
This was in the era when colonialism was starting to recede, and our maps were always out of date. Mr S(?) did a good job of talking about revolution and independence with a bunch of white suburban kids
He asked us which way the Earth rotated – – clockwise or counterclockwise. A group of some three or four of us stayed after class several days to explain our answer “counter when viewed from space above the North Pole, clockwise when viewed from space above the South Pole”. He had scoffed at our earlier formulations, like “counter clockwise in the northern Hemisphere, clockwise in the southern hemisphere” by exclaiming “Then why doesn’t it tear apart!”. And when we started with that “viewed from space” he insisted “But how about on the ground ?”.
(Eventually we made our point using a globe.)
The best part about this Frazz comic was the resulting story. Thanks, Bill!
Curiously, I can see Keera’s comment right above me, but not in the list of recent comments.
Oh, after I hit submit, her comment appeared in the recent comments list.
Or I’m crazy.
I need to take screenshots of every bug that I see, to prove, at least to myself, that I’m not hallucinating.
Great comic – I’ve never seen it , but it plays into the topic yesterday. Not recent though, is it ? And your story was even better !
I salute Mrs. Ryan’s memory.
Copyright in the comic is 2008.
The image above was too fuzzy for me to read on a tiny screen, so I looked up the original (9-Apr-2008).
Oh, that was a great story. Thanks for the smile!
Have you thought about making that board game commercially? You could sell it on Amazon. Or maybe find someone to program it on a phone/tablet.
Todd, I only still have an incomplete version of the game