Luann by Greg Evans and Karen Evans for October 03, 2011

Yeah, “looks” like they’re all ready for a mature relationship!

Would be interesting to see Gunther and Quill in a domestic partnership…

I used to be married and there was never any money around!

Yep, Gunth will stick with his “old comfortable shoe”.

@ john abramsnot necessarily so. This was done once in Batman Beyond

I remember feeling like this, even when we had school dances. I could not ask the one person I really wanted. Good strip today, really makes me squirm by reminding me about being sixteen.

Rosa & Quill! Crystal & Gunther! Luann & Knute! sounds interesting, and because all guys have been paired, poor Tiff ends up with Becky

Seems like we’ve already done this arc once…or is it just that the same scenario has been rehashed in every disney channel, nickelodeon, and cartoon network sitcom

BTW, in first panel, Luann was on the right while Rosa was on the left, in last panel Luann is now in the left while Rosa is on the right, unless there are other girls with similar hair to them at the first panel

A feeling well known to apprehensive, privacy-sensitive teens! But if they do each end up with the favored one, it will go smoothly for all, whereas if they do not, all kinds of perceived problems could ensue….

Don’t tell me that’s what they are really teaching in school in the US?

when Lue found out that Gunther took Rosa to the movies it was because Rosa told Becky, who told Sam(probably Samantha?) who told Crystal, who told Tiff, who told Luann, last week in the September 26th strip

If they don’t cooperate, all six will get a failing grade.

I hate to tell you, but they are teaching “this stuff”. They’re called Family Life classes and they teach middle and high school kids how to deal with abuse in dating relationships, how to balance a checkbook, what coping with a baby 24/7 is like, etc.

It’s all about giving kids skills to be able to function in “real” life. Hey, if you’re gonna teach ’em home economics, might as well teach ’em all the rest of it, too.

Show a sign of being too tired.I thought the teacher said, “You’ll be working in Paris!”

We did this in High School back in the 70’s. Disaster I was paired with an complete opposite, drove me nuts.

Hey everyone, you won’t believe this but I dreamt I met the cartoonist! He came to announce that he was discontinuing the strip, so I went up to him and said “for what its worth, I hope your strip will leave a legacy like Calvin and Hobbes.” As I was leaving he asked if I wanted to take a notebook he didn’t need anymore and I jumped at the chance. The front had mostly writings but the back had many early strips glued to the pages and that sold me. I woke just as we were negotiating a price.

So um anyway I hope Mr. Evans is not planning to retire soon, but even if that is the case I hope we’ll see a happy ending with all the couples: Quill-Luann-Aaron Hill, Knute-Crystal, Gunther-Rosa, and especially Brad-Toni!

Thanks for reading my rambling, as you were =)

I am a foreigner, but the answer to your question is simple: they have taken on (not taken over) this job since it was discovered that Parents don’t have the training to teach life lessons. And that’s assuming that they even try. There are exceptions, but don’t you want everyone to get this benefit? It never was the exclusive purview of Parents anyway, but the days of a whole village raising a child have paled if not totally passed.

This isn’t about “life lessons”. Morals, family ideals, personal standards, etc are still the parents’ purview, but that’s not what this curriculum handles. The “how to” issue is different from the “if and when should I?” question..

A lot of parents have no idea about a rise in emotional abuse and violence in dating relationships, and wouldn’t have the faintest clue about how to cope with it if they did. Ditto with the basics of sex ed/health class – some parents are non-starters when it comes to educating their kids when it comes to anatomy, let alone the rest of it.

If it should only be the parents’ duty to teach a kid to draw up a budget and balance a checkbook, shouldn’t the parents just go and teach the kid algebra, too, and spare the school a teachers’ salary? The answer is that these courses are a safety net for kids whose parents are not hands on for this stuff, so that a legion of clueless, knocked-up and skillless kids aren’t dumped on the world at age 18.

Am still waiting for one of them to come out. Inner city school I teach at has a few gay and lesbian couples. Nothing like the Catholic military school I went to, oh wait….maybe not. No lesbians.

Wow.

A “pretend” marriage with all the ‘good parts’ left out.

What would Ferris Bueller Do?

All this speculation on who ends up with whom, Suppose everyone ends up “correctly” paired— then what? Do Luann and Quill discover that all they really have in common is their mutual attraction? Crystal and Knute are really good at finding offbeat solutions together— will that continue? Will Gunther find a way to be more assertive and at ease with Rosa when the relationship moves off the “foreign” soil of romance, and involves practical, everyday problems? Discuss.

Notice how both Rosa and Gunther are looking while saying don’t look?

This strip reminds me of part of Paul Stookey"s (of Peter, Paul, & Mary) stand-up routine from the recording of their 1961 (or 1963?) concert tour. And yes, the man is very, very funny.

You are all taking this as a real life situation. Greg will have already worked out how he can get most comedy from the pairings, whether they ARE the ones who think they belong together or not.

if we “match them” by face expression and eyes…………….. Quill with Crystal, Luann with Knute, and Rosa ends with the “right guy”

Teens like to think that their love relationships are THEIR idea. Teachers should MYOB.

Mr. Fogarty will wait about 30 seconds – then will say, “If you don’t pick your partners, I’ll assign them.”

oh MAN!!! I remember this in high school!! Problem was I was in the same class as my recently ex-boyfriend and it sucked!!!! Luckily I didn’t didn’t get paired with him….only one of his friends ARGHHH!

Will things FINALLY get moving here

Now, the strip gets interesting

OMG, someone called me a troll for being a little picky? I am fine if you believe I am picky and call me that, but TROLL? I am hurt, it feels like you calling a goldfish a piranha

@Lilrabbit THANK YOU

3 perfect match-ups. It also reminds me of what the High School English teacher did with my brother. She had already learned that my brother and his friend Ike were too perfect a pairing when she had allowed the class to choose partners. She then assigned pairings for a later assignment and then was left shaking her head when the pairings inevitably ended pairing my brother and Ike.

I use to be married, and there was never any sex involved, this a lot of bickering.

As a teacher and as a parent, I think many parents do not think about mundane stuff they should teach their children such as knowing home address, how to write it, how to budget, how to cook, how to clean house, yard, do laundry, etc. Many of them assume they observe and learn. Yes, many of them do, but some do not. Some parents are absent parents – gone a lot working or dating (many single parents do). Some parents do not cook – they order out or microwave dinners. Some parents don’t bother with housekeeping. Some parents do not budget – they just use their cards until there is no money left. Checkbook is obsolete – parents check balances online and kids don’t see that because parents dont want them know the password to their banking info and how much they have in the bank. It’s endless as to why and how come. Most parents live from paycheck to paycheck – always broke by payday. So I think this class IS beneficial.

Gunther and Luann – it’s been done. Gunther and Rosa – that’s the “on” relationship right now. So that would leave Gunther and Crystal. But if that’s done, then everybody needs to be with their non-match, and not only is that a lot to juggle in one strip, it’s not that interesting to me.So that leaves everybody with paired with their present, awkward, relationship. That has potential.As far as who Tiffany is paired with, I don’t care, I’d leave out that detail as uninteresting.

Yeah. That should get the maximum drama out of this.

Wo ist die Tiff?

Two possible plots. Either they match in terms of recent dating, or it gets all messed up. Tiff is also likely there, but no immediate boy.

I hate to defuse you of nice political head of steam, but that’s a total post hoc fallacy if I’ve ever seen one.. I lived in a rural – and pretty wealthy – town, and there were no little “handout services of public institutions” – we didn’t even have sex ed classes. My mom never worked, nor did most of my classmates’s mothers. Yet, that kid I grew up with, whose parents were educated and, incidentally, were from a generation that had no such programs, was left in ignorance.

Sorry, but blaming a basic failure to parent on government programs stepping in is total BS. Is teaching Home Ec (which teaches you to sew, cook, plan and budget a meal) and Shop (which teaches you basic mechanics, so you can at least change a light bulb or a tire) a “handout service”? If so, it produced a lot of people who coped through the 30s, 40s. 50s, 60s….need I go on?

As opposed to the halcyon days of the 50’s and early 60’s when a single income could support a family, nowadays most parents work, and the extended family setup where grandma/pa would step in until mom and dad got home has also vanished. That means a lot less hours available to parent, and the technology we have today means family members are more and more isolated, so that fosters the situation.

The programs exist because the need came first – they didn’t cause it.

P.S. Do you really think it’s only poorer or urban areas that need these programs and not Luann’s “sort of district”? Sheesh. Hate to tell you, but affluent kids are just as much in need of these programs as anyone else.

If Luann’s school – or any school, for that matter – has kids with functioning hormones and sex organs, you better believe that a class that forces a “couple” to care for a fake “baby” or “toddler” for a few days is one of the most valuable “safety nets” you can find.

It may not stop kids from having sex, but at least it’ll move protection to a slot right below oxygen.

REMEMBER: Aaron and Tiff shared their egg, while Luann got paired with Gunther..So I expect a mismatch for at least Luann this time..There are more than six in the class, so Tiff may grab Quill.

how do you get it so its emailed to you?

Now THIS should be a good week!

Men ask. Women say yes or no.

Love this one! LOL! Brings me back to high school days!

Wonder what happened to tony and Brad

whichever has Knute?

Man, you got that right!

I have to laugh – as I said, we didn’t have sex ed, and when a local minister wanted to have an open discussion class one of the women in town – a widow whose boyfriend lived in – called my mom and freaked, because “it will make them think about it more!”

Ironic on two fronts since 1) no one thinks about sex more than a hormonal teenager, and upping that amount just isn’t possible and 2) given her own activities in that area, she must have thought her teenagers were blind, deaf and dumb. Sadly, even given that exposure, she still couldn’t discuss it with her kids.

Oh please – do you really think this country exists in a vacuum? Do you have no concept that we are part of a global economy and the “American Dream” economic boom after WWII of a house, two cars, and a family on a single income was not the norm, but indeed an economic aberration? And that boom was solely due to the war and prior economic collapse in Europe.

You want to talk “not meddling” in the economy? Look at the Great Depression, which was the result of a massive market correction. Look at the bank failures and subsequent lack of credit, brought about by the lack of government insurance for depositors. If it hadn’t been for the war, the Depression would have continued well into the late 40’s/early 50’s.

The need for two incomes now is 1) because Europe isn’t a field of smoking rubble any more 2) the fact that manufacturers have access to offshore labor that’s cheaper – hey, yay for laissez-faire capitalism and no gov’t interference! 3) due to deregulation – yay, again, for no gov’t interference 4) the decline of the unions, which allowed the working class to become the middle class after WWII and 5) the unbridled consumerism that was fed in the 60s by cheap goods not subject to tariff – yay again for no government interference! – are just some of the reasons our economy looks the way ot does today.

So yeah, I’m positive it’s not by “design”, it’s by greed. Since our current economic problems are a direct result of tearing down the firewalls that were implemented to prevent a recurrence of the market crash of ’29, it appears John Kenneth Galbraith was right – the memory of the marketplace is only about 25 years long.

Yeah, they have that right, but again, the schools aren’t teaching morals or personal standards, nor are they trying to take that away from the parents.

Teaching someone about human biology isn’t the same thing as encouraging them to go out and have sex, any more than teaching someone how to balance a checkbook encourages them to go out and steal money so they’ll have something to put in their account.

ALL education could be considered an “intrusion into the intimacy of private lives” but keep in mind that education is very rarely wasted, and teaching someone a coping skill that will help then later in life wilprobably stay with them longer than how to do quadratic equations.

Ignorance is not the same thing as innocence, and keeping knowledge from people never really pays off in the long run. If you’re so afraid your child will be tainted by such knowledge and go off the rails onlearning about it, maybe you didn’t do such a great job of giving your child a good grounding at the outset.

BTW, by the time you hit 8th grade biology you were probably 14, right? Spock and other child development MDs will tell you that kids naturally start asking for reproductive info at age EIGHT. That’s SIX YEARS that any parent has to educate their kid in sex, personal moraity, etc etc before they get to that in school.

If your kids are just hearing about their own bodies and what they can do with them at age 14, well shame on you as a parent. because I can guarandamntee that one of their friends will have gotten to them waay before you did – and their version of the facts may not be so factual at all.

haha wow, this has been on every sitcom I’ve ever watched.

from the teacher’s point of view, he should make sure no one is left out.

Notice how Gunther and Rosa are the only one’s having a difficult time “not looking” at each other.

Quill and Rosa then hm?

Rosa and Gunther are looking at each other. :)