Grade 1 Teacher AND Mother
With today’s reprint from March 31, 1981, Lynn has finally reprinted all the unreprinted March, 1981 strips from For Better or For Worse. She skipped the unreprinted March 17 and 23 strips and she might go back to one of them tomorrow. Or we may finally get our promised new-run featuring the “’Allo?” girl. March 17, 1981 is distinctly possible, since it features Lawrence getting his cast off. March 23, 1981 is highly unlikely, since it ties in too closely with the already-reprinted Farley training strips.
The story today was originally the lead-in strip to the “non-linear thinker” parent-teacher conference strips. The speculation is whether or not the Grade 1 teacher featured is Miss Campbell, whom Elly had never met. In 1981, Miss Campbell’s first appearance by name was in the parent-teacher conference strips. With today’s story, not having Michael present in the shopping line, there is no way Elly or Lizzie would recognize Miss Campbell. The clever reader would make the connection later on in the week, when the same person showed up as Michael’s teacher.
The new-runs changed all that and in a rare occasions, for the better. Back in September, Elly attended the parent orientation for the first day of school and saw Miss Campbell then. This is something good parents do. It always struck me as odd that Michael would be so poorly-behaved in class and yet John and Elly wouldn’t meet Miss Campbell until March of the school year.
In order to utilize the strip though, Lynn has to add something that shows this teacher is not Miss Campbell. The dialogue in Panel 4 is changed from:
“Worse. I’m a Grade 1 teacher.” To: “Yeah..I’m also a Grade 1 teacher.”
I know that Miss Campbell could have had children and still be single. Nevertheless, my guess is that this change in dialogue is so the clever reader knows that this Grade 1 teacher is not Miss Campbell. It also has the side benefit of letting Elly be right that the exhausted lady is exhausted because she is a mother, even though she is also a Grade 1 teacher. After all, what is more exhausting than being a mom, for Pete’s sake?
With the 1981 dialogue, the lady clearly considers teaching to be more exhausting than mothering. I prefer the 1981 dialogue, because saying she is a mother dilutes the surprise effect of the joke. In other words, Elly thinks one way and then ::surprise:: she’s wrong and we hear something unexpected. That’s funny. With the alteration, Elly thinks one way and then we find out in the final panel that she’s right. Only ::surprise:: the woman is also a teacher. That’s not as funny.
The story today was originally the lead-in strip to the “non-linear thinker” parent-teacher conference strips. The speculation is whether or not the Grade 1 teacher featured is Miss Campbell, whom Elly had never met. In 1981, Miss Campbell’s first appearance by name was in the parent-teacher conference strips. With today’s story, not having Michael present in the shopping line, there is no way Elly or Lizzie would recognize Miss Campbell. The clever reader would make the connection later on in the week, when the same person showed up as Michael’s teacher.
The new-runs changed all that and in a rare occasions, for the better. Back in September, Elly attended the parent orientation for the first day of school and saw Miss Campbell then. This is something good parents do. It always struck me as odd that Michael would be so poorly-behaved in class and yet John and Elly wouldn’t meet Miss Campbell until March of the school year.
In order to utilize the strip though, Lynn has to add something that shows this teacher is not Miss Campbell. The dialogue in Panel 4 is changed from:
“Worse. I’m a Grade 1 teacher.” To: “Yeah..I’m also a Grade 1 teacher.”
I know that Miss Campbell could have had children and still be single. Nevertheless, my guess is that this change in dialogue is so the clever reader knows that this Grade 1 teacher is not Miss Campbell. It also has the side benefit of letting Elly be right that the exhausted lady is exhausted because she is a mother, even though she is also a Grade 1 teacher. After all, what is more exhausting than being a mom, for Pete’s sake?
With the 1981 dialogue, the lady clearly considers teaching to be more exhausting than mothering. I prefer the 1981 dialogue, because saying she is a mother dilutes the surprise effect of the joke. In other words, Elly thinks one way and then ::surprise:: she’s wrong and we hear something unexpected. That’s funny. With the alteration, Elly thinks one way and then we find out in the final panel that she’s right. Only ::surprise:: the woman is also a teacher. That’s not as funny.
posted by howard at 9:27 PM
6 Comments:
With the 1981 dialogue, the lady clearly considers teaching to be more exhausting than mothering. I prefer the 1981 dialogue, because saying she is a mother dilutes the surprise effect of the joke.
The 1981 dialogue had to change because Mrs Teacher told Elly to be glad that she's simply a stay-at-home mother; we can't have Elly being told that she's full of bugle oil about being a martyr or being grateful for what she has, can we?
I prefer the 1981 dialogue, because saying she is a mother dilutes the surprise effect of the joke.
I agree--she destroyed her punchline with that alteration. And if it was to distinguish the woman from Miss Campbell, that's just stupid. In the new-run continuity, since Elly obviously doesn't recognize her, she's obviously not Miss Campbell (not that I ever took her to be Miss Campbell in the first place). And there are plenty of non-Miss Campbell grade-one teachers who do not have kids.
I suspect that Lynn's motive falls into "Elly has to be right." It's like the Sunday strip where Elly is glad that Josh the geek god can't fix her computer, all because she was "right" about it being unfixable. I think the strip would have been funnier if Lynn had allowed APRIL to be right about the document being retrievable, with Elly at the end seething about being WRONG.
DreadedCandiru2,
The 1981 dialogue had to change because Mrs Teacher told Elly to be glad that she's simply a stay-at-home mother; we can't have Elly being told that she's full of bugle oil about being a martyr or being grateful for what she has, can we?
That does go against the grain of the Elly martyr system. Certainly as the strip continued over the next 30 years, Lynn’s opinions of teachers changed with them. Back in Lynn Lake, she may have admired anyone who had to deal with little Aaron. Now, not so much.
aprilp_katje,
In the new-run continuity, since Elly obviously doesn't recognize her, she's obviously not Miss Campbell (not that I ever took her to be Miss Campbell in the first place). And there are plenty of non-Miss Campbell grade-one teachers who do not have kids.
While this is obvious to you, it may not be so obvious to Lynn. This strip was originally a lead-in to the parent-teacher conference week. Like the first appearance of Dr. Norman Plett with Lawrence’s leg injury, Lynn’s thought process at the time was often to tie characters in, even if she hadn’t named them yet. Sometimes Lynn gets ideas in her head for correcting which don’t make sense, for example, the elimination of Connie’s cousin from the Montreal trip. She didn’t need to eliminate the cousin. In fact, she made the story worse by eliminating her. To me, the fact that Lynn felt the need to make this alteration tells me that in her mind, this was Miss Campbell.
I suspect that Lynn's motive falls into "Elly has to be right."
There is certainly evidence of this. Aside from the Josh the geek god strip, one of the major differences from the modern strips to the early strips is that in the early strips Elly was allowed to be wrong. She would yell at her kids and feel guilty about how her wonderful kids had such an awful mother. That was never the case with modern Elly.
Not "as" funny?
I disagree - now not funny at all.
The only humor in the original - once you got past Teh Whining about how horrible a fate being a mother was - was that Elly the Martyr had found a bigger martyr than she.
The weak little funny was imagining Elly/Lynn - the woman who hated actual kids (as opposed to how the thought kids were SUPPOSED to be) - confronted with the frightful thought of being trapped not with two but with twenty-two of the little wretches and imagining the bug-eyed stare of Existential Horror.
But this rips the guts out of the original. There's now no "there" there - the woman is harried because "she's a mother" and, oh year, a primary schoolteacher.
This is like how my kid tells a joke; "To get to the...wait, wait, no, why does the CHICKEN..!"
Sad. Just sad.
FDChief,
But this rips the guts out of the original. There's now no "there" there - the woman is harried because "she's a mother" and, oh year, a primary schoolteacher.
Sometimes I run across something I wrote a long time ago and it seems mysterious to me. What was I thinking? Why did I write that? It’s like communicating with yourself across time. When Lynn Johnston goes back to these old strips, I expect there is an element of that. The advantage I have looking at my old writings is that I can usually remember the background, or some part of it. Then eventually I can figure it out. With Lynn Johnston and these corrections, I often get the feeling she has not gone through that process and thinks of her old material as something written by someone else she is trying to fix without trying to understand it. She didn’t understand the joke of the punch line and changed it to something which no one else can understand.
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