What if Calvin and Hobbes were written from the teacher's perspective?

I've been having some great emails with Theresa Tensuan recently, and this is one response I wrote that I thought was pretty interesting (though edited to make more sense and sound less obnoxiously intellectual...I felt like I could indulge myself since I was writing to a professor).

Theresa had written to me about "kids' creativity and resourcefulness in countering adult authority", noting: Here I'm realizing, a la Solnit, that often, as we think we're imparting one one kind of lesson the folks we're trying to reach are learning something else entirely.


The same evening I read the email, I found myself reading a Calvin and Hobbes book before bed, and was thinking about the fact that exactly what makes the comic strip so funny is that Calvin is on an entirely different plane of existence than the logic of the adults and general outside world.

Or, to use some language from English class, Calvin is always undermining the structures of our day-to-day adult logic-- and thereby, he often exposes that these structures really aren't quite as important, or logical, or infallible as they seem to be when we're saying them.

And whereas I general like to think of myself as siding with the 'underminers of social structures' in these kinds of situations, I suddenly find myself as the person who is trying --more or less-- to impose structures onto others. (Here you could make a pun about imposing 'grammatical structures' as well as social ones...).

So I was also thinking, if I were Calvin's teacher, what would I do? Or similarly, what if Calvin and Hobbes were written from the point of view of his parents, or of his teacher? It might still be entertaining, but probably would be a very different kind of comedy (...or, I like the idea of Calvin and Hobbes as more of a 'Freedom Writers' or 'Dangerous Minds' style drama, too).

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Additionally, I had just finished reading Daniel Wallace's Big Fish, and as I finished the book I was really moved emotionally (I love the movie too, which really does a good job capturing the book's spirit).

In the end of the book, the narrator has to accept that is father IS the stories and jokes that he always tells. In other words, accept that his father can only be the 'myth' made up of the stories he's wrapped himself in, rather than idea of 'what a father is ' that the son has always wanted him to be.

And that acceptance is what I think is so moving for me. In the case of working with kids, I guess it means really being willing to accept who they are, rather than my idea of 'what they are supposed to be'. With both the humor and the frustration of their ability to be "learning something else entirely" from what we're trying to give them...and I guess use that acceptance as a starting point for figuring out how to teach/work with them?

(It seems like it would be more ideal if it there were more humor and less frustration, though...Why does frustration seem like an inevitable part of the process?)