This is a story I got out of a parent-teacher conference with Michel's teacher. He was potty-trined at this point, but in a special education setting, it's still normal practived to let a kid go to the bathroom no questions asked. But she had noticed that Micahel always seemed to want to go about 10 minutes before recess, as if to just kill time and get out of finiching his work. So she tested him and lo and behold, once it was time for recess he didn't have to go anymore!
BTW, the teacher here, "Wendy" is based on Michael's Special Education teacher in Kindergarten and First Grade. I consider her a minor-recurring charecter (similar to Becky) but I'm not quite sure when she'll make her next appearance.
4 comments:
You made her too charming in the last frame, like she thought Michael is cute. Alternatively, you could take a younger version of Miss Wormwood from "Calvin & Hobbes".
I love your cartoons: they are cracking me up!
Well, she DID think Michael was cute! And you've got to realize: He was almost non-verbal when he started with her in kindergarten, so the fact that he had progressed enough to actually be SNEAKY, playing games like that? Was pretty impressive, in a perverse way. :)
They kind of had each other FIGURED OUT by the end of 1st grade. He thought he had all the tricks down cold, and yet she knew EXACTLY what was going on.
At the P-T conference, when she first told me the story, I was still a couple months away from starting the comic, but I'd been gathering material for it for a while at that point, and so afterwards I told about some of it, and what I was thinking about doing (which she thought was really good idea) and let her know I was TOTALLY using the story she just told me!
She was very fond of Michael, but he seems to get upset if we run into her these days, outside of school. Really any of his teachers, when he's not in school.
Also... the original charecter designs were not done by me. All of MY original designs were AWFUL but I met a really talented (ameteur)anime/manga artist named Wendy Greene online, who agreed ot make some models that I could work from. (Her work... MUCH better than what I can do, even now.) So I showed her pics of the two kids and aksed her to just make up the other char's. And the one that became "Wendy" was actually her speech therapist idea, but her Teacher idea was just too perfect for "Becky" so I switched them. Purely coincidental but, switched, they both ended up being really good matches for the real-life people they're based on.
As a teacher (of sorts), I've seen this /a lot/, autism or no. And the thing with seeing a teacher outside of school makes perfect sense. Kids /without/ spectrum issues have trouble figuring out what to do or say in that kind of situation - heck adults often don't know what to do or say when they see someone out of context. For someone who has a particular problem altering schemas or crossing categories, this goes from "awkward" to "stressful" really easy.
Great comic so far!
Thanks!
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