Frazz by Jef Mallett for February 28, 2025

Frazz probably ‘taught’ Mrs. Olsen a lot of lessons when he was a student.

Should be easy to grade, just give everyone an A and move on to the next assignment.

This demonstrates part of the reason why essay assignments usually (need to) have additional requirements as to what must be included in the assignment — including the number of words that must be used.

October.

“None of us is as smart as all of us.”

Mrs. Olsen stops to get coffee on the way to work, then refills her cup while she’s at work. I’m betting she has a cup or two at home when she wakes in the morning, too. As someone who has never had a cup of coffee in his life, I find that to be a remarkable amount of caffeine to ingest. I wonder if she ever gets the zoomies. I also wonder if she gets a caffeine headache from withdrawal symptoms is she runs out of coffee?

Well, here we are, the last day of February, hopefully, for this year at least.

May? On May first they become enthusiastic? Or did they mean anticipation of May? It doesn’t make any sense.

Students would see that simple, no limits assignment as nice gesture by Mrs. Olsen. She’ll never tell them she goofed on the details. All benefit. Wish I had thought of that some months.

Not June?

The teachers that stop learning have areas hard time motivating students. And i don’t mean the usual in service stuff

“Do not war against the May.” I came across that recently, but I can’t remember the original source (Dante? Petrarch?).

I means that people in their autumn and winter years (such as Mrs. Olsen) are ill-advised to censure the passions of those in the springtime of their lives. Not just because they, too, were once young, but because it’s a fight they’ll never win in the long term.

only the good ones…

Best way to learn something is to teach it. But I’m surprised she didn’t specify a minimum number of words, a lesson I’m sure she learned long ago. Also, right now I’m looking forward to April.

If I’d been in the class, she’d have had 17 that said “May” and one that said “July.”

Should have said, “What makes you enthusiastic AND WHY.” That way she’d get at least a little creative writing.

I know it’s been this way since forever, and I usually don’t pay attention any more, but for some reason today it again struck me as strange that Frazz always has his eyebrows in his hair instead of on his face. I wonder how (and more significantly why) that ever got started. Anyone know?

Mrs. Olsen once assigned a “What do you want to be when you grow up?” She got a stack of papers saying “Elementary school janitor” and one “Free-range marshmallow peeps rancher.” (That came from Frazz, not Caulfield.)

When I was in high school we got a questionnaire one day all about various things we were thinking and feeling. Even as a teenager I didn’t appreciate the intrusion, but the last question was deal breaker. It was, “What is your deepest fear?” I turned in the questionnaire to the teacher and told her i refused to answer the last question, which, to me, was just proof positive that there ARE stupid questions. (Or at least questions that shouldn’t be asked.)

I would have said baseball in May.

Around here it would be “June”. Both of which are female names in our culture. As is April. Hmm.

She only had eighteen students? I usually had around 35 fourth or fifth graders. One year I did have 18, but they closed the school at the end of that year due to low enrollment.