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The Exploding Woodpecker Effect

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This e-mail arrived over the weekend from perennial sophomore Bubby Spamden, who continues to struggle with the choices facing a young person as he completes yet another year of 10th grade at Wendell Wilkie High School.

Hello Mr. C.,

So last Friday Ms. Murgatroyd called in sick at the last minute and her first hour social studies class, which I’m in, had to go next door to sit with Mr. Eisenstien’s “Introduction to Conceptual Art” class while they called for a sub.

Mr. E. was real good about letting us come in. He said if we had work to do that was class-related we could take care of it quietly in the back of the room while he lectured. That was fine with me because I was kind of hoping I could catch up on some important reading assignments on the backs of my eyelids.

First hour sucks, but you know that.

Anyway, he was up there going on and on about abstract this and subversive that, and the choices people make and how artists have to find a way to be artists and still survive and blah blah blah. Not to criticize him or anything. It’s just that his lecture was making my head feel heavier and heavier – so heavy I was about to put it down on my desk and get to “work” – when suddenly he said he was going to show the class a Woody Woodpecker cartoon.

Mr. E said he had just read an article about this animator who really liked cool art and worked some of it into the assembly line drawing he was doing for a studio. He did it on the sly because high concept art wasn’t supposed to be part of his job and most people are common toads who don’t understand good stuff and wouldn’t cross the street to look at a decent painting with a strong point of view, but they’ll lap up stupid cartoons all day long.

That got me really interested, because I love cartoons. And Woody Woodpecker kicks butt, literally. Mr. E said you can see the abstract stuff in the explosions at 4:40 and 6:33 on this You Tube video.

http://youtu.be/2wfLWL4DPME

So that got me to thinking about what I’m going to do with my life. Mr. E said a conceptual artist can be a social critic no matter what line of work he or she goes into – it’s all about the attitude you take and what you consider to be your “mission”.

Personally, my mission is to get a job where I watch cartoons all day long.
Do you think I should be a super-cool conceptual artist, or just an art teacher like Mr. E?

Your pal,
Bubby

I told Bubby to be clear about the real job of teaching. Even though Mr. E. showed his class a Woody Woodpecker cartoon, that doesn’t mean he “watches cartoons all day long”. Far from it. And in any case it’s a bad idea to disparage someone’s line of work. Being “just an art teacher” is not a step down from being “a super-cool conceptual artist”. But I am glad that something happened at school to get him thinking – and excited about the future.

What was your favorite subject in school?

63 thoughts on “The Exploding Woodpecker Effect”

  1. Morning all – I’m trying to think if I had favorites when I was a kid. I remembering enjoying some of my lit classes in high school. In the seventies at my high school, they had mini-classes every quarter, so instead of taking a whole year of one class, you got to take four. I remember Russian Literature, Science Fiction/Fantasy and “GHOTI Spells Fish” (introduction to linguistics). I remember clamoring to sign up for a fall Shakespeare class at Carleton because the professor was known to have such a great speaking voice. Well, over the summer the professor had taken some kind of education seminar that recommended small group discussion (still the seventies) and we got none of the great oratory that we were expecting. At Metro State, I took everything taught by a particular professor because I enjoyed his style so much. But I like school so much that if I could get someody else to support the household, I’d go back to school full time in a heart beat!!!

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  2. hmmm. trying to remember anything about high school and having trouble – i liked Algebra, Geometry, Trig – they weren’t easy for me but i liked the teacher. mostly i tried to do just well enough with grades. my parents said if i got a C i’d be grounded. 🙂 no rewards for high grades – just grounding for lower. i think they were too cheap ha, ha.
    when i went back to college in my late 20s/early 30s i loved almost every subject and every class. music/medieval lit/Norwegian/lots of Chem/Biology/Pathophysiology/Art History/Anthropology – like VS – i loved “school.”
    now we can take courses at Fond du Lac Tribal and Community College “Senior College” for pretty cheap and there are good offerings. no goat husbandry yet though.
    Listening to “Teddy Bears Picnic” – thanks to my favorite teacher, Donna.
    a gracious good morning to You All.

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  3. Rise and Shine Baboons!

    Being just back from a High School Girls gathering this is fresh on my mind. However, we also realized that 2011 is our 40th year out of high school. Then we felt like old people. Well, until 91 year old Mrs Truesdell toddled up to visit us. She is 91 and Ruth’s mother. She said she still gets together with her HS girlfriends, too. That would be the class of 1939!

    Favorite classes for me were American history, American literature, and Band, Band, Band. Did I mention band? We had a fabulous band program in those days and most of my friends also played instruments. Without band, my high school days would have been dreary.

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    2. I liked band until my second year of high school. There was a shift in power that year in the flute section…and I was looked down on for not having the right kind of flute or the right private teacher. I quit band mid-year rather than fight about whether or not I could be a good musician without an open-holed flute or an expensive teacher (can’t remember if I told the band teacher it was because of my section mates – though I think I did – the word “snotty” may have been used to describe my section mates). I made some good friendships in band with people in other sections, but with one or two exceptions, my fellow flutists were not a companionable lot.

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      2. Would “snooty” also work? I like the thought of a band director suffering through an entire year with a bad case of the snooty flutes.

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  4. from the the jail sentance that was catholic school to the love orgy that was modular scheduling i had an interesting schooling. catholic school was 4 r reading riting rithmatic and religion and science and social studies with music and phy ed as once a weeekers. the nuns were meaner and the teachers that werent nuns were meaner, the friendships that were formed were ones of survival. the independant study experiment that was modlar scheduling left 60% of your time open for studying what you wanted and needed. library student union and art were favorites there in jr high. in high school i was so uncertain about which direction to go in i decided to go in them all and have it covered that way. the usual english math science social studies language were required but the others, communication, art journalism philosophy psychology debate, theater arts shop music all were of interrest. we were required to take 6 credits 10th grade and 5 in 11tha nd 12th. i took 11 all three years and when i got done i had a well rounded background but a distaste for the learning enviornment. i did the hippy van for a year and came back to the u of ma for art music and settled in to business with my dad. loved the art classes, music was theory and history so i ended up at the west bank school of music and that was interesting but business got my attention. cartoon watching sounds like a doctoral thesis goal for bubby but at the rate hes going it may take a while to get there.

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  5. Pardon me for wandering OT here, but I hope I’m not alone in being shocked by how violent and mean-spirited most old cartoons tend to be. I suppose you could run this Woody Woodpecker cartoon in a business seminar as a near-perfect example of how NOT to resolve conflict.

    Even as a kid, I flinched at the world presented by cartoons. I had problems identifying with Donald Duck when he threw a hissy fit at Chip and Dale because Donald, to say the least, had a big chip on his shoulder. Yosemite Sam was a sociopath. Sylvester had the scruples of an alleycat. Even Tweety Bird, while he didn’t initiate hostilities, was a sadistic little bastard.

    I didn’t enjoy cartoons until I was rescued by creation of The Roadrunner. I could handle the character motivations in Roadrunner cartoons. The poor coyote was hungry and acquisitive; I could relate to that. The Roadrunner wasn’t a really into psychological torture, although his efforts to foil the coyote were stylish. Whereas the cartoons of my childhood were uncomfortably aggressive, The Roadrunner was all about wanting something too badly. Roadrunner cartoons weren’t about gratuitous violence so much as the hazards of over-reaching. When we are pursuing a goal we can easily become so absorbed by the challenge of the chase that we do unwise things (as for example strapping our bodies to Roman candles and lighting the fuse). Some of the more educational Roadrunner cartoons are wry commentaries on the hazards of trusting too much in technology. This is stuff we need to know in our modern world!

    Nothing in my life allows me to enjoy flattening the body of someone else with highway construction equipment, but the theme of frustration making fools of us was . . . is . . . the story of my life.

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    1. i had such a problem with the lack of theme that it was impossible for me to be held captive by a roadrunner cartoon. the notion of a poor dumb cayote getting surpried again was nothing i need to spend 5 minutes waiting for the 14 variations to play out. george of the jungle, tom slick and who was the underdog like charachter that was part of that trio in 1966? those were great cartoons along with rocky and bullwinkel and huckleberry hound with his friend al cabong. now they have phinnias and ferb, anamaniacs and the other cartoons that are written for parents and plugged into kids time slots. pee wee was the best example ever of wonderful stuff for kids the parents would enjoy as much. tom and jerry had the best parody ever in the national lampoon about 1969. i will see if i can find it and report back. gotta love google.

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    2. Yes, but I do admire the way flattened characters peel themselves off the floor or wall, give a little shake, pop out to three dimensions once again, and go about their business. When I am feeling steamrolled I do wish this could be done in the real world!

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      1. That’s interesting, Dale. I agree it is cool when a flattened critter holds his nose and blows, returning to 3D again. But one of my problems is that I can’t identify with all that fighting with others that I see in cartoons. That isn’t me. I don’t fight, so I can’t identify with all that conflict. But what is easy to identify with is all the ways I sabotage my own life doing things that make sense at the time but later look foolish (the coyote straps on roller skates that are jet propelled and . . . . !!!!!).

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      2. I thought the bit where he peels himself off the billboard and has the original outfit from the billboard on his backside, was a darn good piece of creativity.

        I just watched the clip with no sound-have to say, the artwork on the backdrops is pretty nice!

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    3. Awww, no, what you are saying, tim, is personally threatening. You can’t identify with Wiley E Coyote? Wiley is actually a personal hero of mine, not because I admire him but because I share so many of his qualities. My whole career as an outdoorsman was a series of variations on the Wiley E Coyote approach to life. I never strapped myself to a Roman candle, but in my desperation to shoot a pheasant or catch a trout I came very close to that. If you can’t identify I suppose that means you are just THAT much more mature than I. As to how much Wiley E Coyote there was in my Match.com years . . . I just can’t go there.

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      1. I am sorry to be touching on a sore point. I would have a hard time watching you do the death spiral for an extended run. Please do not consider this a personal thing I just get bored being put in a spot where the party banging his head against the wall can be reached to help come to resolution. Wiley has a reason to keep the perpetual peeing on the electrical fence routine as part of his m.o. I just choose not to watch. Match.com… I tried early versions of singles listings in the tc reader and never felt so defeated in my life. I became celabite for an extended time then I got married and extended it another couple decades. Watch out what you wish for. There is Devine sense of humor out there that satisfies itself on the unsuspecting schmoes of us that need reminding not to take ourselves too seriously.

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    4. My college played roadrunner cartoons continually through final weeks…great to empty the mind for a brief respite. Still fond of them.

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  6. I’m like verily s. and barb – I liked a subject if I liked the teacher. In high school, loved Latin first year because of Miss Sadoff, very dynamic and kind, and a great listener. Hated it 2nd year because of “Piggy” Sheare (an affront to our beloved “Miss Piggy”, I know). Mr. Mairs for Biology had us do the Bug Collection, which was surprisingly fun. Loved chorus and orchestra – anything hands on… In college it was Anthro, Kiddie Lit, Intro to Educ (again, the teacher), Astronomy, some Psych and Sociology, anything music oriented…

    Knowing what I know now, I wish I had taken in high school: Basic Woodshop, Arts, Journalism, Speech and Theater. Of course, there weren’t as many offerings when I was there – i.e., we didn’t have pottery. ButI didn’t have enough imagination back then to imagine myself doing them. School really is sometimes wasted on the young.

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  7. Socially, school was miserable, but I loved learning, so I did well in everything but math. English was my favorite (I was also a kick-butt speller…on paper, not aloud. I tended to deliberately blow spelling bees so I could get back to my book!). I can relate to Tim’s experience in Catholic school, except that we were taught by angry German spinsters instead of nuns, and while there was plenty of the “4 Rs” there was no science and very little music until high school. College, by contrast, was heavenly–the professors LIKED it when I talked!–and if my adoptive mom hadn’t been diagnosed with cancer my last year at St. Kate’s, I’d call those the best years of my life.

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  8. Good morning to all:

    There were some classes I liked mainly because I liked the the teachers. These were teachers that I could connect with in some way. These teachers included an art teacher, a science teacher, and an english teacher who seemed to be a little interested in me as a student and member of their classes. I drew a picture of the art teacher that he liked. The science teacher had various kinds of animals in the classroom from time to time that I found interesting. The english teacher gave us writing projects that appealed to me and seemed to be interested what her students did.

    Mostly I found classes to be very boring and a lot of work that was not very interesting. I think education has been long over due for a new approach that is more student centered. Most teacher seem to teach in a top down way where they don’t connect very well with their students. Even very interesting topics can be made dificult and boring by teachers who force feed their students.

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  9. Morning–

    I generally liked school. One semester of Astronomy was probably my absolute favorite. Plus the teacher was a family friend and I liked him as well AND he actually let me and my best friend play with / run the machine in the planetarium.

    Band was always fun. Eighth Grade English with Miss Powers who required us to keep a journal which I believe lead to my enjoyment of writing.
    But mostly High School was my best friend Pete and I hanging out in the schools technical repair department in the mornings with a man named Art who gave us a key to the elevator and let us deliver film projectors and TV /VCR carts (which were just becoming popular) to the class rooms.
    And sometimes when he was working on the internal part of some machine would say ‘Stick your finger in here’ and then just before you did he’d slap your finger and say ‘What are you doing? Don’t stick your finger in there!’
    We made name tags for the teachers. We got to run lights in the auditorium.

    I signed up for the acting class because of the teacher but he got sick and died the semester before I was to have the class… The replacement teacher had big shoes to fill; which she didn’t. I suppose she gave it a valiant effort but I wasn’t impressed.

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    1. had the same experience with the acting teacher of choice dying just befor i got there. dont realize what youve got til its gone.

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    2. Great story Ben. We don’t appreciate the difficulty of taking over for someone who can’t be replaced. I wonder how your new teacher felt about the enormity of the assignment.

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  10. I suppose, “yes” is not an appropriate answer. Even at an early age I was a liberal arts kinda kid (though I wouldn’t have known to call it that at 8 or 10). Art, literature, natural sciences, writing, social studies – it was all just dandy by me. I loved geometry (both proof geometry and plane geometry), but had a lousy teacher for advanced algebra, so quit taking math after that (wish someone would have told me more loudly and clearly that I could take math analysis without completely understanding trig…I probably would have enjoyed math analysis). Had three years of Russian – that taught me to appreciate language in all sorts of new ways – loved the unexpected parallels to English and other languages I knew a bit of, loved the structure, fascinated by how culture is both shapes and is reflected in language.

    Favorites in college were art and anthropology – and scenic design. Had a great physics teacher who taught a class that presented all the concepts of physics without the higher math – great for someone like me who by then was a little math-shy but still wanted to learn more science. Loved loved loved being able to combine my arts and anthropology interests with more writing in grad school in a degree that allowed me to use various art forms as a filter for viewing and studying culture, especially culture as it evolves and changes.

    Like VS, if I could be a full-time student again, I would do it in a heartbeat.

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    1. I guess taking classes is still an interesting activity for some people and it would be for me if I could be sure of getting interesting classes and teachers.
      As a substitute teacher I saw a lot of kids I am fairly sure were not doing as well in school as they should because they didn’t like most of what they were required to do there. This really needs to change.

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      1. I think I may still have the physics text for the class if you’d like to borrow it. The professor who taught the class wrote the book because all the college-level texts he found were for more traditional physics classes. The text (and class) had the uninspiring name of “Contemporary Concepts” but everyone called it “Physics for Poets.” Professor Kim and his blackboard pals Moe and Joe (and their chalk board spaceship) were fabulous.

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    3. Well said, Anna. I would like to say I agree 100%, but that would be flattering myself. I’m surely lazier than you, so the idea of a course might sound good but become oppressive when I actually got around to doing the required reading. In spirit, I couldn’t agree with you more.

      In undergraduate school, to keep the students from getting fractious they used to import all kinds of fascinating artists, historians and political wizards to give us amusing talks. I never before or since have had such easy access to exciting free lectures. And it was great to go back to the dorms and have people there who could argue with me about what we’d heard. Those were wonderful times.

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      2. Grinnell. Right smack dab in the center of thousands of square miles of cornfields, and the school used to attract a demanding, creative kind of student. So we would have boiled over into chaos if we had not been fed a constant diet of distractions imported to amuse us. And remember, we weren’t allowed to own cars in those days. Our world was as big as our legs could stretch to make it.

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  11. King Arthur in English and American Literature. Took this at Metro and I think it was close to one of my favorites of all time. Imagine getting course credit to read Marion Zimmer Bradley’s “Mists of Avalon”. Again!

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    1. my current comuter book on cd! (again). I love Davina Porter’s reading of those books.

      Verily, if you have not yet read the last book mostly written by MZB about St. Helena, you should check it out-I think it is the best of the bunch.

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  12. Looking back on it, I find it interesting that I was so good at some subjects but so bad and others that I (at the time) considered to be very closely related. I was a whiz at algebra but terrible at trigonometry and only fair at calculus. I was great at chemistry but marginal at physics. I was good at English but lousy at debate. Certainly, the instructor plays a critical role in how well a particular course gets taught. I wonder if there is a correlation between my favorite teachers and my favorite subjects? Hmm…

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  13. I didn’t respond to subject matter so much as to exceptional qualities in my teachers. Over the years I had some punk teachers, many average ones but a handful of truly elegant human beings who were a thrill to know. Mary McNally in high school. Joseph Wall in my college. David Noble, Mulford Sibley, Toni McNaron and others in grad school. I treasure memories of all of them.

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  14. Kinda OT – but starting 4/16, there will be three new exhibits at TMORA (early Soviet painting, architectural vision of St. Petersburg, Russian Imperial porcelain). Anybody interested?

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  15. Band, choir, and history were my favorites. I had great teachers and directors. My travels with three high school girls and one other mom were great fun this weekend. The girls sang in a juried vocal competiton at NDSU. The trip was not without incident, however. When we were about 75 miles from home and too far away to turn around, daughter’s best friend looked up from her Algebra 3 homework and said the five words every mother on a road trip dreads “Mom, I forgot my dress”. This was a problem, since the girls had to sing at 8:00 am on Saturday and we wouldn’t get to Fargo on Friday until after most of the stores had closed for the night. Dresses for singing events these days are pretty fancy, hybrids between short prom dresses and cocktail dresses. We tried to brain storm several solutions, such as calling someone who we knew in Fargo to borrow a dress (not an option), having best friend change quickly into my daughter’s dress when it was time for her solo (strange and disconcerting for the judges) or just stopping at Target late at night in Fargo for a plain black skirt and white top (chancy and repugnant to best friend). We also didn’t want to make our trip any longer than it was going to be already. (Shopping for a cocktail dress on the way to Fargo could take some time). I made an executive decision and stopped in Bismarck at Herberger’s, where we quickly and miraculously found a perfect frou-frou number on sale for $27.00. The rest of the trip was so much fun. I’ll have to describe the singing competition at a later date. I must say, though that I sure heard enough Italian arias and art songs to last a lifetime.

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    1. I elected not to run ads on Trail Baboon, but would it be so wrong to solicit some kind of sponsorship from Herberger’s? This real-life, saved-the-day testimonial is the kind of advertising gold that marketing people dig for in vain!
      It would be a small ad. Or maybe Blevins could be pictured wearing a perfect Herberger’s frou-frou. With a price tag that says $27.

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      2. I think Blevins would look stunning in the bubble dress with the green skirt and black strapless bodice ornamented with the big green bow in the front.

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  16. I always loved singing – still do. Singing makes me feel better when I’m blue. So, it’s not really a subject, but my favorite thing was choir, followed by band (snooty flute player here!), theater and English.

    Internet was down all weekend. Playing catch-up today!

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    1. I always loved singing – still do.
      Singing makes me feel better when I’m blue.
      Start of a lovely rhyme, Krista. 🙂

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  17. I never comment on here re education-related topics.
    Just let me say that I love the sneaky expressionist art in Woody Woodpecker. Someone was really working to catch that. There is a sort existential perfection in this being done in a Woody Woodpecker cartoon. It’s also a sort of tim and TGITH moment, too.

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  18. Greetings! My favorite subjects in school were generally English, spelling, art and science. I was and am abysmal at anything math related. I think I wrote a long post some time ago about my traumatic middle-school math class and being tormented by two popular girls.

    In college, I really enjoyed French class and Dr. Paul D’Andrea’s liberal arts classes. There was always interesting discussions in the liberal arts classes. A memorable one was a comparison of “Waiting for Godot” to Heisenburg’s Uncertainty Principle — great stuff.

    Speaking of ‘”Waiting for Godot”, did you hear the bit Garrison did on PHC show on Saturday? “Waiting for Godot” the musical — what a riot!

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  19. I was never a very good student, but my favorite school experience was a field biology class I took one summer. The teacher piled us into his pickup truck and took us on field trips to state parks and fish hatcheries and places like that. Any time in school that is not spent in a traditional classroom is memorable.

    My high school also had three excellent teachers in the history/social studies area, and I remember those classes quite fondly. The teacher is key, just as later in life your job satisfaction is heavily dependent on how well you like your supervisor.

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