Baldo by Hector D. Cantú and Carlos Castellanos for March 11, 2010

Baldo, it’s your name on the paper and it’s your grade. You got 5 wrong.

Oops

Blame shifter Baldo!

Carmy nailed it.

The agency I work for sometimes has planning reports done by contractors, but the agency’s name and logo is on the cover. If something in it was done wrong, we still accepted it, and we have to man up and take responsibility for it.

YOu guys? Obviously that didn’t include Gracie. Did Tia help? She must be good with fractions, due to her hobby.

I agree, Potzrebie, “You guys” can’t have included Gracie.

I think the wording of the strip is appropriate, in a narrow sense. The test has five wrong answers. ONE was something that Baldo thought was correct, and FOUR were things that he took on faith from “you guys”. Had others not “helped” on those four, who can say? Perhaps Baldo would have answered them correctly. Or he might have left those questions unanswered (in some grading formulae, a wrong answer is worse than no answer at all). It’s the old “Yeah, I made a mistake. I TRUSTED you, that was the mistake.”

Yes, but how many did you get right with their help.

Baldo, you better fix that five wrongs on your paper and make them correctly by yourself.

Gracie doesn’t know everything, but Gracie’s smart enough to look things up when she wants to know something; we’ve seen that on many occasions. She doesn’t make pronouncements about things that lie outside the boundaries of her knowledge, and if she HAD been consulted about Baldo’s homework, she probably would not have given him answers that turned out to be incorrect. Sergio and Tia Carmen, on the other hand, may very well have undue confidence in the “correctness” of the misinformation they provide. A lot of older folks have that failing.

By heaven, it is as proper to our age To cast beyond ourselves in our opinions As it is common for the younger sort To lack discretion. – Polonius, Hamlet (W. Shakespeare)