Recent Comments

1. 15 days ago on Crabgrass

   Since Crabgrass is set in the past (there’s no definite date, but it seems to be late 80s to early 90s) special education during its time frame wouldn’t have included kids being put in the main classrooms. Back then special ed students were put into special ed classes to make sure they all got the extra attention and support they needed to succeed in smaller class sizes with teachers that had special training to handle the various issues those students faced.

   When the mainstreaming of special ed kids started there were no personal aides for them. Their teachers were supposed to somehow provide them that support on top of all their regular work, which resulted in what @colinmac2 described. Many school systems still don’t do this, so colinmac2’s experiences are sadly still common today. Even more sad is the fact this was (and is) absolutely a goal of some of the administrators, especially the bean counters. After all, if a special ed kid drops out they don’t have to spend any money on them…

2. 16 days ago on Phoebe and Her Unicorn

   They haven’t yet, we’ll find out when the new strips return, hopefully next Monday.

3. about 2 months ago on Crabgrass

   Yep, my mom was a teacher’s assistant when the mainstreaming started and she told me how bad it went. It was an absolute disaster for everyone in the school. Having worked IT at that school district years later I’m confident it still is, since IT was largely a disaster. (Including the CIO using four character single word passwords on the AppleTalk routers, because “it’s so simple no one will ever guess it.”) I really don’t miss that job.

4. about 2 months ago on Crabgrass

   Mainstreaming can work, but it has some potential downsides if not done right. Kids that need a lot of extra assistance from a teacher don’t do well mainstreamed and they can impact their entire class, if the teacher slows down the lessons’ paces to that one student’s ability. That can lead to bullying as well, because the other kids are well aware it’s that kid’s fault. It can also lead to that kid falling behind the whole class (and grade), because they don’t get all the help they need.

   The ideal is to mainstream kids who can keep up without a lot of extra assistance from a teacher and do special education for the ones who can’t and need that extra assistance. Unfortunately most schools fail at that and a lot of special needs kids get mainstreamed that never should have been.

5. about 2 months ago on Crabgrass

   To add to what others have said, you’re judging her by the standards of today, but the comic’s set in the 80s to early 90s. This is perfectly normal behavior for a teacher back then. She’s also telling him the truth, that’s exactly what special ed was meant to be. Having gone to K-12 during that time period I don’t see her as unsympathetic at all, not by that era’s standards. It probably wouldn’t fly today, but special ed largely doesn’t exist today, since kids with learning disabilities were integrated into the regular classrooms as much as possible (kids with dyslexia definitely are), so it’s a moot point.

6. about 2 months ago on Crabgrass

   Keep in mind that this comic’s set in a time period somewhere in the 80s to early 90s. Back then it was normal to send kids to special education and announce it openly. Teachers hadn’t quite yet picked up on how much this caused other kids to tease and make fun of the kids receiving it. I think it was late 90s to early 2000s before that started changing. So she’s not being mean, she’s acting like any teacher of her era would.

   And yes, you can criticize them as a group for doing that, the problems should have been noticed sooner. That’s fair.

7. about 2 months ago on Crabgrass

   Yep, I had lessons for some kind of speech disorder in first grade, something that vanished after the lessons, so they were clearly successful. (And I no longer remember what it was.) But they fell under “special education” as well.

   But it wasn’t meant to be derogatory, it was literal: it was specialized education for students with special needs. Unfortunately most students needing it had severe learning disabilities, so the other kids would make fun of anyone receiving special education, no matter what they were receiving it for.

8. about 2 months ago on Dick Tracy

   Mysta looks like she’s real tired of Diet’s doubting her BS in that last panel. He’s probably lucky she didn’t zap him. And he probably deserved a zap.

9. about 2 months ago on Crabgrass

   See also: Boeing’s current management structure and the primary reason they’ve had planes fly themselves into the ground, door plugs blow off of planes due to not being installed properly and their Starliner crew program so screwed up that NASA opted to return the astronauts on a SpaceX Crew Dragon instead. (And frankly I’m genuinely surprised Starliner managed to land safely, I was expecting it to make a crater.)

10. 2 months ago on Crabgrass

    There was a kid in junior high that’d do just about anything on a dare and a small payment. I remember him crushing up an ibuprofen tablet and snorting it for something like fifty cents and he jumped in a big mud puddle in a ditch for a whopping quarter. It had about 6 inches of water at the time. Kid clearly was desperate for attention.

    I also remember some kid eating a live bee once on a dare, although he had the sense to pull the stinger out first. Not sure if it was the same kid, though.