Glenna Stearman Park, 2000
Most of my teaching career took place in San Antonio, Texas. I taught at a K-12 boarding and day school for girls with a 100+ year history, started originally to educate girls from West Texas ranch families.
I did happily get up early to go to school. The kids were generally a riot. I still hear from many who are now adults. Basically, most of the students had only me as their art teacher throughout the grades. I gave them a lot of the class work that I did in college art school. I had to create fresh ideas for “another year with old Ms. Park.” I would be teaching today if I didn’t have medical issues. It was great fun!
I refused to fill out forms for absences, but sent a cartoon to the office showing me taking the pulse of sleeping high schoolers. If they had a pulse, they were here.
One day, I was teaching a first grade class so antsy that I made this cartoon while the kids painted and then told them to give it to their teacher. That teacher saved it for about 20 years and sent it back to me last year.
For this same class, I did another cartoon of me erasing their mouths so they could not make noise.
I have a number of candidates if you would like to go into business distributing cards and they are still effective….
I hated printed forms at school so much that for 17 years I refused to fill them out. One year, one of the principals “suggested” that I should fill out the attendance forms so they could stack them neatly in a filing place. I told him that I could not communicate on official forms, but he could come to my classroom to fill them out. I continued making cartoons.