Frazz by Jef Mallett for February 27, 2013

That’s awfully divisive.

Meanwhile, in science class, cells are multiplying by dividing……

And nobody caught the pun??? …very sneaky! Pastis would be proud.

And then she can explain to his parents why she failed him when he did his work and she did not.

Scan Caulfield’s paper and goose the contrast.

Awww, Caufield is brilliant! We need MORE Caufields in this dumbed down society.

Actually, I was responding to: “this kid spouts stuff that would go over the heads of most postdocs”. And I have great difficulty in detecting the “intellectual elitism” you frequently deride here. I just assumed your stated distaste for “Frazz” on an almost daily basis might be an indication of your taste in humor. I apologize. Please list examples of strips that are smart but not examples of intellectual elitism. I am, as you say, finding this a difficult concept to grasp. (And I get and enjoy most of the humor in “Frazz”).

He said hard to read – not impossible. I’ve graded a lot of papers that were hard to read. Most teachers manage to read whatever they receive unless there is a foreign language problem. Spanglish – ok. Cambodian? beyond my skills.

I get how Caulfield can come across as way advanced in knowledge while having to work hard at his math assignment. As an adult, I once remarked to my mother that I had a great fondness for math because it was the one subject at which I had to work the hardest. She expressed surprise and said that it had looked to all the adults as if everything came easily to me. At age ten, I was reading pretty much everything in my parents’ library, including Margaret Meade, Balzac, Thorstein Veblen (no idea what he meant by anything, but I persevered through some of it), a book on the Great Barrier Reef (loved that one and read it many times), and so on. But I struggled to learn the multiplication table just like all the other kids. I didn’t have a Frazz with whom to discuss literary ideas the way Caulfield does. But math, even at the arithmetic level, involves acquiring and applying new knowledge and skills with the requirement that the results be correct, while batting around ideas is completely fluid and subjective.

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My intention above was not to toot my own horn, but to illustrate that there are real kids who are at least somewhat like Caulfield.

Balzac’s “Droll Stories” was my introduction to pornography. My dad knew where every book lived on the shelves, and he used to have to come to my room to get that one back in order to fill the space. He never did make it go away, which, as a parent today, I would definitely have done.

Don’t subtract from the joke!

@GorgoloChick Don’t know if it exists in e-form, but abebooks has it really cheap in book form. They’re cheaper than amazon, and after reading about the recent amazon scandal in Germany, I’m off them for now, anyway.

Chaucer! Rabelais! Baaaalzac! (Meredith Wilson)

And when Ms Olsen gives it back to him to recopy…or get an F…Caulfield will learn a little more.

Whoops. I have read some “Bliss”. I had forgotten. Not one of the “New Yorker” artists I’m keen on…

Caulfield thinks reciprocals are hard? What does he think they are?

@comicsssfan Yes, it can be very demoralizing and demotivating (in case that’s a word!). Literacy, arithmetic, a foreign language, a musical instrument – anything that demands practice toward a good performance can be demoralizing to an adult, or to a child for whom other kinds of things are effortless. So then you don’t practice enough, so you don’t get better at it, so then you feel even worse about it, and so on….

@ bigpuma@ kiddeo

>> It’s a pleasure to follow such a civil discussion as the one you two have carried on today; thanks to you both. And in particular, thanks for sticking with it until some understanding was reached.

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I agree that “Frazz” is elitist according to bigpuma’s definition, but to me it’s perfectly okay to have an intellectually elitist comic strip for the enjoyment of those who enjoy it! Bigpuma argued a few weeks ago that grammarians often come across as “peevish fussbudgets” whose discussions of the finer points of language are of interest only to themselves. (And I love that phrase so much I almost changed my screen name. :-)) Okay, so what? It was the loss of the clever wordplay in “Frazz” from my local paper that brought me to go comics.com, and it’s precisely because I so enjoy the challenging repartee that I so often find in “Frazz.” It is just as hard on a kid to live at the top end of the intellectual ladder as at the bottom; our schools are offering more “special education” for the ones at the low end than for the ones at the upper end, and why? Because gifted-and-talented programs are often seen as elitist.

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To me, it’s good fun to see somebody “catch” Mallet in such improbables as the Fibbonacci/reciprocals thing. I wouldn’t know Fibonacci if I fell over him, nor do I remember what reciprocals are in math, but I get the point, and I love it. I don’t see Mallet or Frazz as “know-it-alls,” nor do I think that way about commenters on Doonesbury who are immensely more knowledgeable about many things than I am. Some of their stuff interests me, and I learn from it, and some bores me silly and I skim over it. It’s all good. And Puma, thanks again for “peevish fussbudgets.” I’ve found it useful almost every day – though not, I will admit, out loud!

Oh, bussfudgets!