#flying octopus

UNTITLED 

So for the last few months I’ve posted just one drawing a month.  And it’s not like I was all that prolific for the year or so before that.  There’s a reason I’ve had so little time to post here, but the good news is that it’s finally over, and I should be able to get back to much more frequent posting!

(This post, however, I’m probably going to keep relatively short, because I’m extremely tired and want to get to bed.  I tend to ramble on at considerable length, though, so “relatively short” for me might well be relatively long for most people.)

As for what that reason is, well... for some time I’d been making a living primarily as a studio teacher, working with child actors on film sets.  But then the pandemic hit, and there were no film sets, so I had to do something else.  And I went back to classroom teaching.  As it turned out, it wasn’t too long till the film industry started back up again, so maybe I could have stuck it out a little longer.  But having been hired as a classroom teacher, and knowing there was a teacher shortage (especially in my particular subject area, physics; and especially during the pandemic), I felt an obligation to stay in that job.

Not that I wasn’t tempted to quit.  Being a classroom teacher is a very time consuming and stressful job.  Last year most of the teaching was remote, which in some ways made it a little easier... but that made this year all the harder, because there were kids who hadn’t been in a classroom setting for a year and hadn’t really developed proper classroom behavior or study methods.  So yeah, I’ve been having a very difficult time; I’d been getting very little sleep; and I haven’t had time for much except classroom prep and grading (or intending to get grading done, procrastinating it, and falling further behind).

(Apropos that last parenthetical, I think part of the reason I’ve had such a difficult time with the teaching job is that while I’ve never been formally diagnosed I’m pretty sure I have ADHD, which makes it really hard for me to overcome my executive dysfunction and make myself do things like grading assignments.  There may be some jobs for which ADHD wouldn’t be much of a problem, but teaching is not one of them.)

So why hadn’t I come out and said before that that was the reason I wasn’t posting more?  Well... mostly because if my students came across this blog, I didn’t want them to know it was me, as I feared they would have if I wrote here about my teaching.  And how would my students find out about my blog?  Well, perhaps through the credits of a website I was going to show them.  To give the students more motivation to work on assignments that didn’t directly affect their grade, I decided to make a sort of an online game where they could earn XP for class participation and assignment completion, which would allow them to more easily defeat monsters (which they battled by answering review questions about the materials we were studying).  And by defeating monsters, they would get in-game gold, which they could trade in for equipment to improve their character or for real-world prizes.

That, at least, was the plan, and I’d hoped to get the website up and running over winter break and introduce it to the students at the beginning of the semester.  (Well, actually I’d originally hoped to get it done over Thanksgiving break, but when that didn’t happen I shot for winter break instead.)  As it was, with everything else I had to deal with I didn’t get it into anything resembling a working state till the penultimate week of school, and even then it was only in something resembling a working state; it had some significant glitches and had only the most basic features.  The students could fight monsters and get in-game gold and trade that in for real-world prizes, but that was about it, and the graphics were rushed and... not great.  Still, I went ahead and introduced it to the students and... it actually went over very well despite its rudimentary state, enough so that I wished all the more that I had managed to get it done earlier and had it from the beginning of the semester.  Ah well.

Speaking of said rudimentary graphics, I may as well show off the monsters from the game.  There are only four of them so far (there were a lot more planned), and the graphics are rough and unpolished (I was going to refine them later), but here they are: the Two-Headed Penguin, the Fake Ghost, the Flying Octopus, and the Piranha With Legs:

But, like I said, it’s finally over.  Yesterday was the last day of school.  (And I’m not going back to the classroom in the fall.)  So I should have a lot more time to post here now.  (Well, and time for the many other projects I’d put on the back burner.)