It was a rush.

I finalized my Unit Plan on Imagining Argentina earlier in the week and began rereading the book, taking notes for the day-by-day discussion. My cooperating teacher scheduled a review of the plan for Thursday after school so there was plenty of time. But as the week wore on, she realized she was going to be more or less done with her foundation work by Thursday. As we reviewed the schedule, taking us through the end of the third quarter, it actually made more sense to begin the book on Friday so we’d be done by the winter break.

On Thursday, the plan needed only one minor tweak, which built off of a class exercise we had just done and she promised the students we’d be doing again. That was easy so I adjusted my plan then prepared a unit schedule to hand out to each class, copied everything they needed and could just wait.

Now, I had five classes all to myself in December, with nowhere near this amount of prep time, but Friday I found myself with butterflies. I was genuinely nervous, partly because this was real; it counted towards my certification and was not an emergency Band-Aid. At long last, I was actually going to have my teaching observed and critiqued.

Period 3 wound up having a fascinating, eye-opening conversation about language heard in school, showing conscious and unconscious forms of negative language being used. As a result, there was suddenly less than 15 minutes for me to hand out the books and schedule plus take them through a brief history of the country to set the stage for what they were going to read. That zipped right by.

For the next period, even though we were having an equally interest conversation, we were more conscious of the time and I did get through the full presentation. However, a student asked a question I thought I was prepared for and sort of fumphered my way through the answer. Afterwards, it was suggested I admit to not having the full answer and would get back to him the next class.

And with that, my six weeks running World Literature Seminar was underway. Meantime, I helped my 10^th Grade teacher by playing accuracy judge for all four of her English 10 classes during the in-class Poetry Out Loud competition. That certainly filled my day and helped me get over the surprising anxiety. I still need to complete outlining my Macbeth unit plan for her, but at least have a little more time for that.

Now we’ll have to see how the students react to my solo performance with my first formal observation set for week’s end.

My first four days of student teaching were pretty much what I expected. It felt a lot like my internship, watching from the sidelines, although I got to participate here and there. But as I also expected, my two teachers are different enough that I can compare and contrast, and learn.

We began World Literature Seminar and I know a number of the students in each class, finally meeting some I merely recognize from the halls. We’re slowly building a foundation for the semester-long course, starting with the notion of what it means to be a foreigner. We all wrote a two-page piece on a time in our lives when we felt like the foreigner and then shared them in class. That proved fascinating (and I wrote about the first time I visited a trade show in Deb’s field, feeling like a warped version of the cons I’ve attended for decades). We are now working with a poem about an outsider’s view of entering Mexico and we’ll continue along these lines until next week when I begin teaching, leading them through the novel Imagining Argentina.

In fact, when I wasn’t in class, I was pillaging the department’s files to see how others taught the book; I was drafting my own unit plan.

Meanwhile, the two English classes began a unit on poetry, beginning with “B” by Sarah Kay, an up and coming poet. The kids were also asked to pick poems they wanted to work with for the forthcoming school-wide Poetry Out Loud competition. I got to select which poem each student was to use, which was fun.  After using “B” to learn to how dissect, analyze and understand a poem, we spent Friday beginning to work on their individual choices. Complicating things was that my teacher was out so I worked with a substitute, which was odd. What was satisfying, though, was working with one student who was absolutely stumped about her poem’s meaning. I read it and began decoding it with her and we came up with an answer and she asked, “How’d you do that?” So I walked her through it again.

I may be getting the hang of this teaching thing.

This week will be more observation while building my first two unit plans and submitting them for review. So far, so good.

I’ve been a fan of ElfQuest pretty much since the day Phil Seuling visited the Starlog offices with a bunch of swag. He would come up and hang with the publishers but always drop off some product he was handling through his Seagate Distributors and one day there were some issues of this magazine-sized black & white comic about elves that I had really only heard about.

I read the books and were hooked, going on to cover the series in Comics Scene, and befriending Wendy and Richard Pini. They wrote a guest editorial for me, provided me with news as the Starblaze color collections were being produced and got along just swell. We’d see one another at conventions and eventually acquaintances became friends. Once, I ran into Richard on the ferry ride from Connecticut to Lon Island as we both headed for I-Con. I introduced him to Kate and some time later, he sent me a complete box full of ElfQuest trades, which Kate and then her friends devoured.

Years later, DC Comics acquired the rights to ElfQuest, both archival and new material. Since we’d start with reprints, it fell to the Collected Editions department to manage and since I knew the creators and property best, I suddenly became their editor. We had a jolly time together and brought our shared passion to not only turning the classic story into four handsome Archive volumes, but also creating new stories to further the saga. It was a stretch of the rules, but I was allowed to edit the new material as well and that was a rewarding experience, with people who cared deeply about storytelling and clarity in the process.

All along, they had hoped the deal with DC meant the parent Warner Bros would succeed where numerous other studios failed. ElfQuest was ripe for animation but for whatever reason, it never took off. With the success of Lord of the Rings on screen, everyone was scrambling for the next great franchise. New Line bet on The Golden Compass, Twentieth Century-Fox took a gamble with Eragon, and so on. None succeeded. And ElfQuest was left dormant and in time, disinterest among many DC execs meant the property was neglected and eventually the deal ended.

Oddly, about the time DC stopped living in the World of the Two Worlds, the parent company finally bit. They optioned the property and there was great excitement and hope.

This week, it seems, those hopes were officially snuffed out when Warner passed on the property. They were once more focused squarely on Middle Earth, feeling it had the only elves they could want which is odd coming from a company that owns more superheroes than most people can count.

Wendy, Richard, and the elves deserve far better and it’s a real shame Hollywood has yet to figure out how to successfully bring the charming Leetah, dashing Cutter, and their friends (and foes) to a wider audience.

After four weeks off, I returned to Darien today to begin my student teaching. On the one hand, it was incredibly familiar since I have been coming to the high school regularly and on the other, I was beginning an entirely new chapter in my teacher preparation.

I was welcomed back like a long, lost pal which felt great. I got a nice hug from the teacher who permanently replaced me replacing the now-gone English teacher from December.

I attended the back-to-back World Lit Seminar classes and was introduced although I knew many of the students fairly well alread7y. We spent the first day of the one semester class reviewing the syllabus and dealing with questions so we eased right into things together.

After a few periods off, I then attended the two English 10 classes, where I had previously subbed so was immediately made to feel welcome. There was a little confusion among them when it was explained that in a few weeks I’d be taking over the class and their regular teacher would be absent from the room but they were ultimately comfortable with it.

And after classes ended, the two teachers and I sat down to review the voluminous paperwork from University of Bridgeport and map out how the twelve weeks would work, when I would take over which class and which four week stretch all four would be mine. That allowed us to solidify that I would handle Macbeth for English 10, as planned, and now add in Imagining Argentina for World Lit, plus largely supervise their third quarter paper. We were fortunately all comfortable with one another and they have confidence in me after interning and the December trial by fire.

This is going to be fun, I think.

I completely missed that my editor Michael Eury announced, just before Christmas the contents of the June issue of Back Issue! The cover story and bulk of the issue will be a career retrospective interview I conducted with Jenette Kahn. For those unfamiliar with Jenette, she arrived out of the blue to become DC’s publisher in 1976 and became its President as well in 1980, taking the title of Editor-in-Chief later on.

Jenette, with Paul Levitz, was responsible for DC experimenting with formatting such as 80-page dollar comics and adding eight-page backup stories in what was intended as a DC Explosion but management canceled the plan so today it’s better recalled as the DC Implosion. Still, she improved page rates and reprint rates for the talent, later ushering in the field’s first royalty plan and created an environment that encouraged talent to experiment.

Under Jenette, DC expanded in countless ways including creating its Special Projects division and upgrading the quality of the licensed merchandise the company approved. She championed the characters moving forward, heading into television and movies although that took a lot more time. It’s really her efforts in print that are best recalled since she allowed the content to mature and rewarded the efforts by creating Vertigo and later Piranha/Paradox Press. She also recognized when the time had come to spruce up the Big Three, using Crisis on Infinite Earths as the catalyst. It all culminated in 1986, the company’s biggest year when it released Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight, the revamp of Superman, and Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons’ The Watchmen.

Jenette left staff about a decade back and has gone Hollywood, a partner at Double Nickel Productions, which was responsible for Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino. Through the years, Jenette has usually preferred to let everyone else talk so has been rarely interviewed. When Michael suggested it was time for a career look back, I jumped at the chance. Jenette agreed and we spent hours between June and August chatting. The resulting transcript is being fact-checked and edited right now and I should be delivering this to Michael in a few weeks.

Also in the issue will articles on those Dollar Comics, the unrealized kids’ line, the Wonder Woman Foundation, an interview with my pal and neighbor  Bob Wayne, the early days of Vertigo, and a tribute to the recently departed Eduardo Barreto. Should make for some fine reading.

I don’t know how I managed it all, but I read 75 books in 2011. That’s more than I have in quite some time. Admittedly, some of the reading was for school and some of it was also done at school when I had time on my hands early in my internship at Darien High School. Also, once I began commuting to school, I began “reading” via audio book, using CDs from the library to either read books being taught in school or the occasional personal choice. And with 75 books read, it’s interesting to note how there were long stretches where everything I read was not necessarily what I wanted to read.

Still, I managed to sample more than a few new authors, honoring my annual commitment to reach out. So, what stood out in my mind as worthy of recommendation? The full list is behind the cut but I should mention Colonel Roosevelt, Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand, The White Tiger, Juliet, Naked, Baseball in the Garden of Eden, The Magicians, and In the Garden of Beasts. I truly enjoyed Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games trilogy although felt the final chapters of book three fell apart and needed serious reconsideration. It did not dampen, though, my anticipation of the movie in April. I also enjoyed the final book in my friend Laura Anne Gilman’s Vineart War trilogy and wish she would write some more.

I continued to read my usual assortment of newspapers, magazines, and comic books although I always felt behind. Starting in the fall, my local weeklies and weekly magazines began showing up later and later. I called and complained to the post office and got a “we’ll look into it” but my local carrier told me that a new sorting system was screwing everything up and no one cared enough to fix it despite the complaints. So, Time, Entertainment Weekly and The Week – which normally showed up on Fridays – began arriving anywhere from Monday to Wednesday making them dated.

I’ve begun using the iPad for some reading and this week have begun downloading the magazines on their scheduled release date so I can remain contemporary. Earlier this year, I experimented with reading a text book via the Kindle app for my phone, laptop, and tablet and decided this was a useful step forward and suspect in the coming year, will switch more of my reading to an electronic device.

Here’s my reading list. What do you recommend I try in 2012?

My final week as an intern and fill-in teacher more or less went as scheduled and I have to say the time seemed to zip right by.

The World Lit kids had spent last week examining differing retellings of the Cinderella story so Monday we drilled down to the lessons one can learn from Hansel & Gretel. We watched the related Bugs Bunny cartoon and then got into the psychological underpinnings to a story of child abandonment, cannibalism, and the cruel duality of women. Tuesday we spent the day in the computer lab so they had time to complete their group presentations. My second World Lit class was slower on the uptake that there was a group project at all, so we spent a second day in the lab to give them a chance.

Meantime, the first class began presenting on Wednesday, finishing Thursday. They were encouraged to be as creative as possible, but clearly they went on autopilot so I got plain vanilla PowerPoint presentations. Some took it more seriously than others but my successor and I were equally disappointed in the lack of effort.

Yesterday, the second period kids did their work and it was more of the same. One had a great story to tell another had the most visually interesting presentation but it was still more PowerPoint. Now there’s a place for the program, and I admit to using it as well, but when 30% of the grade is given to the creativity of the presentation, they took the easy way out and the grades will reflect that.

My English 10 kids took a vocabulary quiz and were given a review on how to annotate a short story before we delved into Ursula K. LeGuin’s “The Ones who Walked Away from Omelas”. We worked together annotating the first page before I let them pair off and work through the remainder. Then we spent Thursday in the computer lab, as they arrived to see which of the CAPT prompts I selected for them to work from.

I stayed until 4 yesterday and was back in at 6:30 this morning to grade all three periods’ worth of papers in the hopes of getting them back today. One, to demonstrate their work had value and was worth some effort on my part. It was also another measure of the progress this quarter and I wanted them to have some constructive feedback before taking the break. As you can imagine, nearly five dozen 1-2 page essays on the same topic can grow tedious but the quality of the writing and points raised was varied enough to keep things interesting. My successor checked over my grading and agreed with it, so I proceeded apace.

Today was a half-day and the English kids should have met in book clubs but did minimal work and lots of chitchatting, while eating cookies. The seniors were at an extended assembly so I missed them all.

And as the bell rang at 12:18, my internship drew to a close. As a year-long experience, it was pretty amazing. I learned so much and the emergency assignment came at a time I felt ready to take the next step. I continued to learn, including the fact that I can get so attached, so quickly. In fact, as my successor spent time in the class, I was feeling like the sub again. And today, it was more than a little sad to bid farewell well to my first flock of students.

I truly believe they are better educated now than when I inherited them, abating their fears and anxieties, getting them back to thinking and working.

But as this ended, I was also finally given news of my student teaching, Come the third quarter, I will be working with two World Lit Seminars with seniors and two different English 10 classes. While I will have the one coordinating teacher, the 10^th graders will be with a different teacher and we’re all very happy to be working together.

I’ll appreciate my extended break and then soon will build the anticipation for getting back into the classroom.

The week was a whirlwind as I struggled to stay a day or two ahead of the classes while sifting through the mountain of ungraded papers. By now the students had come to accept the new situation and there was a lot less anxiety.

On the other hand, I was making them work and they were unused to it in English classes. They also seemed to think assignments had optional due dates.

The World Lit classes began the week wrapping up Don Quixote. We started with songs and poetry written about the character, examining recurrent themes and how none focused on his madness. It gave me and opportunity to play “The Impossible Dream” from the Man of La Mancha cast album and Gordon Lightfoot’s “Don Quixote”. Tuesday they were to have come in with five questions to ask the class about the reading and I went around the room, randomly asking students to pose their questions. Sure enough, in both classes, at least one student had come without questions prepared.

The rest of the week was devoted to Fairy Tales. I prepared a PowerPoint presentation on their history and how they differed from Myth and Fable. I took them from the theories of their origins to the current resurgence of movies and TV shows using the fairy tales as source material. We then looked at the “Cinderella” story as told in seven different countries and had them work in small groups, analyzing the differences and discussing them with the class.

The English classes completed their work on The Whale Rider. We did an in-class lab studying Maori weaving patterns, what the symbols mean and had them design their own. On Wednesday, the classes participated in their first seminar-style discussion which would be their assessment for the material. Sure enough, they were a little uncomfortable not having done this before and they needed some direction but overall, all three discussions were quite different from one another and interesting. One girl warned me she hates public speaking and wouldn’t participate and I said her grade would reflect that. At the very last moment, as we wrapped up, she raised her hand, made some cogent comments and later told me she was shaking the whole time. I was proud of her.

On Thursday we reviewed vocabulary for a quiz and then worked on the building blocks of grammar along with work on commas since grammar is part of the mid-term. On Friday, they held their first book groups, discussing the books they chose for themselves and delving into them.

It’s interesting to see who has written me with questions, which kids missed a class and got in touch about making up the work. I’ve had to adapt on the fly as kids have begun reporting in that they’d be out this whole week or part of it, getting a jump on the holiday. And I am surprised at how readily I’ve come to see them as MY kids, looking after their best interests and trying to get to know them all.

I even corresponded with one parent and had a parent meeting for one of the special ed kids. This stretch of my internship has opened up a light into portions of the process that I had only heard about at a distance – and never in grad class.

On the other hand, the school found a long-term sub to complete the school year and she joined us on Friday. I introduced her to the classes and as we worked, she took small groups into the hall for a brief get to know you session. Fortunately for her, she’ll shadow me all week as I complete my plans and she sees the classroom behaviors and can plan ahead so starting January 3 she can take over with far more preparation than I had.

I enter my final week of the internship, eagerly to complete my time with the kids and more than a little sad it has been all too brief.

This has been a lousy week or so for comic book professionals and fans alike. In a very short span of time, we have lost of our earliest pioneers in the field and another fine artist, who I personally enjoyed working with.

Joe Simon was there pretty much at the beginning of the comic book industry. His collaboration with Jack Kirby made the pair stars and perhaps the first creators to be wooed from one company to another with their names emblazoned on covers. Simon was editing Timely’s comic line when he and Kirby created Captain America and created a sensation. DC wooed them away and they leapt after publisher Martin Goodman reneged over promises. They were better treated at DC but even so, they wanted to be their own masters and set out to do comic on their own. As a result, they created the romance comic genre. Simon on his own continued to write, draw and edit for numerous publishers, helping create the only competitor to Mad that had staying power. When he returned to DC in the late 160s and again in the early 1970s, his stuff was distinctive although it finally appeared to be a little out of touch with the current readership.

Simon has never shied away from continuing to mentor others and produce new works, writing no less than autobiographies that shine a light on those early days. That Titan is collecting the Simon & Kirby works is a testament to their variety and creativity.

I personally met Joe on a few occasions but never really got to know him or do any work with him but his loss is still keenly felt.

Jerry Robinson, though, I did meet more than once and we got to know one another during the production of Batman Cover to Cover. He was warm and gracious, willing to tell me stories he’s told countless times before. His work with international cartoonists and fighting to protect their freedom to publish their works is perhaps the least recognized accomplishment in an illustrious career, but could also be considered more significantly than creating the Joker.  Again, this is a man whose career is more than any one character or publisher. Like Simon, his life story was recently recounted for posterity while his history of the field has been rightly republished. He was a gentle giant of a creator, preserving the field’s early days and passing the knowledge forward.

Eduardo Barreto’s passing can easily be eclipsed by Simon’s but he should be remembered. The artist came from Uruguay and brought a smooth line to DC Comics in the early 1980s. I still recall watching him come in with two or three fully rendered cover sketches, using bright color markers and impressing one and all. When he finally moved from covers to interiors, he brought a fresh look to his titles. Often he followed the brilliant Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez on books such as Atari Force, since they were similarly trained. I first worked with him on a fill-in issue of Star Trek and coupled with Ricardo Villagran’s inks, it was a refreshing take on the characters. He was also grateful for the work and friendly to a fault. We lost touch after our paths diverged but I enjoyed following his efforts as he moved from comic books to comic strips, where his style seemed better suited as comic book reader tastes changed. His strips were clean and well composed, even as illness complicating his ability to produce regular work.

All three men leave the field far poorer.

In January, I began my graduate career and today it ended. In between, I logged 33 credits plus an additional six credits of supplemental required undergraduate literature. At some point in the near future, I anticipate receiving a diploma in the mail, a physical memento of the achievement.

My internship runs through the 23^rd and boy am I having fun with the kids. In theory, I will then get a break before reporting back to Darien on January 24 to begin my twelve week student teaching run.

What I find interesting is that most everyone I spoke with this past year, all congratulated me on this course of action then told me what a waste of time grad school was. For something so universally recognized, it’s amazing the universities themselves aren’t revamping their programs to make them more relevant (and therefore more attractive, enhancing their own reps).

Most of my professors were enthusiastic and well-qualified but all but one of them were woefully out of touch with what is happening in schools today. There are rapid changes occurring that the curriculum has made no attempt to keep up with. For example, little was said about the changes to the Core Curriculum, Race to the Top or No Child Left Behind. We never discussed new trends such as the flipped classroom or the increasing debate over the value of using social media to teach.

There was also a tremendous amount of wasted time by curriculum overlapping one another, leaving other gaps unaddressed. And let’s not talk about how the University of Bridgeport campus was still using overhead projectors in the day of the Smart Board. There’s a lot left to be desired about UB’s lack of uniformity and consistency between what our teachers say and do in addition to general administrative befuddlement. The latter is another knock I hear aimed at most institutions of higher learning and that’s a real shame.

Did it make me any better prepared to become a secondary education English teacher? More that I readily give UB credit for but certainly not as well prepared as they could have. Nothing beats being in a school and the classroom and the teaching has to be in support of that experience.

I never thought I would take the time or find the need to have a Master’s Degree, but now that I have it (with an anticipated 4.0 no less), I will also admit it’s very cool.