A Carla Ventresca cartoon that came to me via Mar Rojo on Facebook:
(#1)
It turns out that Mark Liberman posted this one on Language Log back on 3/18/07, with a nice discussion of the teacher’s incorrection (of fast to quickly) in the last panel. There’s another incorrection in the first panel, of shrimps to shrimp; as Mark noted, both forms are standard plurals for shrimp. (The remaining three corrections concern spelling and punctuation and are appropriate.)
Searching for this posting of Mark’s led me to more cartoons with English teachers in them.
Here, for instance, is one by Mark Anderson:
(#2)
I also found some “English Teacher Cartoons and Comics” in Frank and Ernest cartoons by Bob and Tom Thaves. These are under copyright restriction, but I’ll describe two of them here:
(#3) Man at greeting card counter: “I need a “Get Well” card for my old English teacher. Do you have one that cajoles in the indicative rather than commands in the imperative?”
(#4) “How English teachers avoid tickets.” Woman to traffic cop: “Speed limit 35. It’s an incomplete sentence.”
On the strip, from Wikipedia:
Frank and Ernest is a comic strip created and illustrated by Bob Thaves and later Tom Thaves. It debuted on November 6, 1972, and has since been published daily in over 1,200 newspapers. The humor of the comic is based almost exclusively on wordplay and puns.
And on the cartoonists, again from Wikipedia:
Robert Thaves (October 5, 1924 – August 1, 2006) was the creator of the comic strip Frank and Ernest, which began in 1972.
… He attended the University of Minnesota, where he received both a bachelor and masters degree in psychology. While still at university, the first of his cartoons were printed in magazines. He continued to be interested in cartooning, and developed the Frank and Ernest strip while working as an industrial psychologist.
Frank and Ernest began appearing in magazines as early as the 1960s. It was first nationally syndicated November 6, 1972 and was eventually carried in 1,300 papers. It was the first single panel strip to appear in the “panel” format, and the first to use block letters for its dialogue.
… His son Tom began collaborating with him on Frank and Ernest in 1997. The elder Thaves had planned on transitioning his son to take over the strip before his death.
[Added 10/15: another English teacher cartoon on this blog, “When English teachers snap”.]
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