Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson for October 16, 2019

Only solution: send the boy straight to college so he can study paleontology.

Good point.

Dad, you clearly don’t know Calvin’s definition of “reading and learning”.

I’m surprised that Calvin’s dad hasn’t played the “schooling builds character card yet.” ;-D

Dad is actually talking like a father to his son which is good. Now he just needs to play with him more.

This was one of my favorite strips (All-time favorite Calvin-Dad bonding was over the raccoon). Dad gave some good insight. Too bad Calvin’s as stubborn as they come

This was my son’s major complaint about school.

This leads me to something I’ve often wondered about…. I loved dinosaurs when I was a child. I would read about them, draw them, hope they were out there somewhere. Lots of kids did. But how did we even hear about dinosaurs? It’s not like there were people talking about them all of the time.

Moe.

Poor Calvin will be a fossil by the time the education machine is done with him!

…or Spaceman Spiff

Flintstones. Meet the Flintstones. From the town of Bedrock.

I loved reading when I was a child—-until school tried to make me do it! At that point I stopped reading until I became an adult and started reading again.

Before the Flintstones and before the movies there was the museum. I was fortunate to grow up in New York City. A 15 minute-subway ride from the Museum of Natural History.

I still have a pterodactyl paperweight brought as a 6-year old. It is missing part of its nose and a part of its tail. The felt is long gone. Somehow it has remained in my possession and my wife and I have kept it on display (usually on the stove) in every kitchen we’ve ever owned all over the world.

Every couple of years I have to wash the grease of a thousand meals off it. I see it every day, but I often don’t notice it, but when I do it brings back memories of my trips as a child to the museum.

Long gone is my stuffed Bugs Bunny (my version of Hobbs), long gone is the sheet metal Fort Apache, long gone are my action figures of the Lone Ranger and Tonto on their horses. This broken piece of metal is the sole surviving relic of my childhood.

This is one of those few times when both Calvin and one of the parents has a point simultaneously.

If teachers taught more relevant and interesting things, children might enjoy learning more. As a kid growing up in the 60s I hated English classes. The teachers were constantly ramming 400 year old poems and plays into our heads. Then in 1969 I got an English teacher that changed all that. Along with the standard curriculum he taught us about current songs. I remember when he brought in a record player and played Elvis Presley’s “In the Ghetto” or The Beatles “Revolution” and asked what we thought those songs were about. Needless to say he had our 100% attention and that year was my highest grade in English.

Credit where credit is due. He can read so I suppose it is just a matter of getting him interested in what he is supposed to learn in school. Frankly, it didn’t work for me either.

Calvin is definitely not a philomath

Content is king.

This strip so perfectly describes my 7-year old great nephew. The kid has memorized the name and stats of every dinosaur you could think of. The young son of a friend can tell you the name of every Pokemon if you give him the Pokemon list number. Obviously both of them are obsessed. I have no idea why. /me hides my dragon collection…

Ask a silly question…

And there it is… answer of the ages.

If Calvin had to read about dinosaurs at school it would no longer be fun.

A Brontosaurus leaves Chicago heading east at 20 mph. A Tyrannosaurus Rex leaves New York heading west at 10 mph . . .

They meet in Cleveland?

An uncle of mine wondered how it was I could quote from Dickens, or recite entire passages of The Lord of The Rings, or make apt comparisons between Hamlet and Batman, but for the life of me when it came to math, I really couldn’t tell you at what time two trains , traveling at 145 MPH, would collide on the way to Iowa.

With that sweater Calvin’s dad could sub in for Hobbes if he had to

I like the serious conversation between father and son. But school irony is apparent. Calvin will understand once he grows.

Calvin has a point…school could be made a whole lot more interesting. I had to wait til I took a college course in anthropology to really learn about dinosaurs.