Edge City by Terry and Patty LaBan for April 01, 2024

Sounds familiar, catholic school. N

He was supposed to do Crossing the Delaware, not Crossing the Rubricon ;)

I don’t think his teacher is a good influence, it seems to me that she kills the creativity of her students!

If you can’t follow instructions, then you’ll end up somewhere else.

Junior high? That’s the worst time to let them start thinking for themselves! They’ll get in all manner of trouble…

I provided installation instructions to contractors for the installation of various systems aboard Navy ships. If they couldn’t follow directions and used their “creativity” instead, every ship would be different and those that worked would be a nightmare for maintenance personnel. Learning to follow instructions is very important. If you can’t follow instructions, I don’t want you doing my installs, go draw graffiti on stone walls to show your “creativity”.

Who on earth thinks schools want you to think for yourself?

The teacher isn’t presented very sympathetically, but the fact is, you can be creative within the specifications. Think of sonnets, or limericks. Very specific forms, but a lot of variation.

A retired teacher here. How does a teacher grade for ‘creativity’? A good teacher will always use a rubric to grade! This helicopter mother needs to just shut the hell up and go away.

Now you know why home school numbers are increasing

Schools teach conformity and thinking is frowned on. The admins don’t do any of that so why should the students.

Throughout my career, I had numerous supervisors. It took me awhile to learn how to work with those that wanted me to be a self motivator (not always looking for directions), and those who were complete opposites (micromanagers who did NOT want me to be self motivating and wanted to be in control).

When they will become rather single minded.

Joke’s over – move on.

Sadly more thruth in this comic today

What this teacher (and most of the commenters trying to take her side) isn’t understanding is that you can have both following instructions AND allowing for creativity, especially for an art-inclined project such as this, and that doing so generally promotes better learning. But the teacher seems to think you can’t have both, which is patently ludicrous. Have instructions enough to prevent attempts at cheaters and to encourage the lazy to step up, but otherwise allow enough freedom for the students to fulfill the given assignment as they see fit. So long as the intended goals of the assignment are all still fulfilled—which in this case Colin ABSOLUTELY did—then there really shouldn’t be any problems to be complaining about on the teacher’s part.

In other words, there’s following instructions, and then there’s micromanaging to the point its stifling. This would be the latter. And the latter is no fun—I’ve had teachers like her before, who insisted you couldn’t do anything unless you did it all as they personally would do it, and effectively handhold you through the assignment. Remember how at the start of this arc, everybody was accusing Abby of doing the assignment for Colin? Well, this was basically that except it was the teacher doing it for me instead. I didn’t learn much of anything in those classes and look back on those classes with disdain. The classes that gave me the freedom to learn for myself were both more effective and more memorable.

And she adheres to that concept……

Follow the outline, get a good grade.

In today’s educational establishment thinking for themselves is almost universally discouraged. They are told what to think, not taught how to think.

Look at it this way, say you’re taking a creative writing class and the instructor tells you to write ten pages about what you did last summer. Those are the parameters. A specific number of pages and a specific time frame. You can be very creative and still stay within those boundaries. If you turn in five pages about how you plan to ride a SpaceX ship to the moon next winter, what grade should the instructor give you?