March 2007
	People

Comic Relief

Several NEA members are finding themselves in unique new roles: superhero and comic strip star.

For a group of dedicated, serious professionals, there’s an awful lot of funny business going on with NEA members around the country lately. Sixth-grade Cherry Hill, New Jersey, science teacher Hermann Hoffmann is hanging out with the Thing and Spiderman on the cover of Marvel Comics’ “Brain Drain!” special edition. The Oregonian’s new comic strip Adams’ Apples is penned by art and music specialist Jim Adams. And in Minnesota, the creator of the Schoolies and Mr. Woodhead comic strips is a social studies specialist.

Hermann Hoffman found his way into the ink after a student nominated him for “Superhero Teacher of the Year.” Rachel Benigno’s essay about Hoffmann’s classroom dedication and his work with the environment club and girls basketball team at Beck Middle School beat out 4,000 other entries in the Teachers Count/Office Max competition. Four other NEA members were finalists for superhero status: Mario Guerrero, Kathryn Pariseau, and Tony Pavlovich of California, and Karen Yingling of Ohio. In the comic, they battle Dr. Doom as he and his Doombots try to sap students’ minds. (To read the comic online, see http://www2.nea.org/mediafiles/neatoday/braindrain/braindrain.pdf.

“As an elementary school student I liked to read Batman and Superman and classic comic books,” says Hoffmann. “It’s just amazing to look and see that you’re on the cover of a Marvel comic book.” He says the likeness—created from photos he submitted after winning—is good. “Everybody who sees it says ‘That’s Mr. Hoffmann,’” he says. Now former students, fellow teachers, and family members from as far away as Germany congratulate Hoffmann on his superhero debut. “[They are] telling me it’s really neat to see teachers put in such a good light,” he says.

It’s a similar, but funnier, spin that Jim Adams puts on the school, students, teachers, and support professionals who appear in his Adams’ Apples comic strip. “Like most teachers, I found frustrations in the job and I had to put them somewhere,” he says. “It’s therapy.” Finding material is easy. “It’s like picking fruit every time I walk into the classroom.” Many of his strips are inspired by exchanges with the 400 or so students he sees weekly in his art and music classes at Marshall Elementary in Vancouver, Washington.

Like Hoffmann, Adams made it into print as the result of a contest. At the urging of his father, when The Oregonian asked for new comic submissions, Adams sent in the handful of strips he’d drawn. Until then, his only audience had been his peers in the staff lounge. When the newspaper’s editors asked readers to vote for comic strips to be added to the paper, 25 percent of the vote went to Adams’ Apples—enough to vault it into second place, behind a formidable opponent: classic Peanuts strips.

In his classroom, Adams has students create their own cartoons. The public success of Adams’ Apples has been a boost, and he hopes to see the strip syndicated in the upcoming year.

Seeing much of their own careers is what resonates with readers of John Woods’ comic strips Schoolies and Mr. Woodhead and his monthly humor newsletter Learning Laffs. A recent issue of the newsletter—which chronicles the fictional Fuddle River School District—featured a list of approved esoteric educational jargon, including “assessmentalizing” and “whatsoeverables” and such banned terms as “learning” and “teaching.”

“Most of the humor is for teachers,” he says, “not for students or for parents.” Woods—a social studies curriculum specialist in Minneapolis—refers to the comic strips as therapy. “Humor is so important, especially when you’re doing work that’s really important,” he says. “You have to find things to laugh at. You have to find the silliness, just for mental health.”

—NATALIE McGILL