i noticed my burnout comic was making rounds but the full comic is no longer available after the collegehumor website went offline…. so here it is!!!

This character was always 100% a young boy hiding behind a mask that hid and disallowed every emotion except for his anger, the only emotion that men are allowed to feel. This character is an exploration of how toxic masculinity harms men. And what miracles can happen for men internally when they embrace emotionality and forgive themselves and use their energy to do good. (I’m crying about him again.)

It’s fine to not care about the money, as long as the wages are enough to live by. Not caring about making more money than you need, is one thing.

But if the wages are no longer enough to live by? Not caring about making what you need to get by, that’s something else entirely.

Second, the atmosphere is actively hostile.  The joke in the US is, “Those who can, do.  Those who can’t, teach.”  Teachers are viewed as losers who can’t get a real job, as failures and as somehow incompetent just by dint of being a teacher.  The curriculum is dictated by politicians on the school boards who rarely actually listen to best practices or whatnot–since, to their minds, teachers are failures and incompetents and anybody can teach, why bother listening?  And then there’s the religious and culture war motivations by those politicians–everything from “Must teach Creationism/Intelligent Design in schools” to “Blacks were ‘workers’”, recently spotted in Texas textbooks!  (And since Texas is one of the biggest textbook markets in the country, the Texas school board has an outside influence on the rest of the country’s education)

And then there’s No Child Left Behind and its legacy of teaching to the standardized tests; the thing about the US school system is that it is not designed to create citizens who are independent thinkers.  It’s designed to churn out compliant worker cogs for the needs of industry (and the industry of three generations ago, at that!).  So the standardized tests are useless from an educational perspective, stressful on both the teacher and students, and waste time that would be better spent educating–but from the perspective of US oligarchs, standardized tests are valuable quality control over their next batch of drones.  

As a subset of point two, schools are funded by property taxes, so if you’re not teaching in one of the rare well-off zip codes, then you’re straight up screwed for resources.  In poorer districts, funds can be so strapped that teachers have less than two dollars per student for the entire damn year.  

As a subset of that above point, while the educational and enrichment aspects of school are routinely underfunded, sports suck the school budgets dry.  “We can’t afford to properly funds the arts, science, history, or any educational programs… but we CAN built a multi-million dollar sports stadium!”

To illustrate that last point, here, the Louisiana State University Locker Room:

And the LSU library:

Very often, the highest paid public employees in a state are sports coaches:

And THEN, after they’re underfunded, dictated to like they’re automatons too stupid to know how to teach, stressed out by oversized classes and overscheduling because there’s not enough teachers…

And then, in the last twenty years…

“Did the fire alarm just get pulled so we’ll all go out and get shot by someone with a gun?”

As the damn cherry on top of everything else.  

NO

B R E A T H E

Caduceus is out in the cemetery, tending some of the older families, when he hears the creak of iron and, just out of range of his hearing, two voices. It’s a moment before it sinks in that there’s no reason for both voices to be familiar; another before he recognizes the voice of the visitor greeting Nila’s cousin Rull; one more and his feet are carrying him without much in the way of conscious thought between graves and back toward the temple.

Caduceus steps into the temple and comes up short. Hearing Fjord’s voice was strange enough; seeing him here, rising to his feet from the table where Rull seated him while the tea brewed, feels like some kind of waking vision.