teacher – Andertoons Cartoon Blog

20 Education Cartoons For Back To School

August 19, 2013January 10, 2017 andertoons3 Comments

Kids and teachers all across the country are getting ready for a new school year. (WOO!) So I thought I’d help get everyone in the mood with some education cartoons!

Enjoy:

I’m sure I’ve mentioned it before, but my wife is a teacher, and believe me, this cartoon is fairly accurate.

I don’t know if it’s the case anymore, but when my kids were born it seemed like every boy was named Logan. I knew Wolverine was popular, but sheesh!

You just know that kid is going to grow up and crash the entire financial system one day.

This education cartoon was really really popular about a year ago. Is Pinterest still a huge deal?

I’m really happy with how this cartoon sort of steps down from positive to OK to uh-oh in only 8 words.

My wife uses that phrase a lot. For example, “I like how (insert name here) is paying attention.” It works like gangbusters usually, and I had fun playing with it a bit.

Ignorance is bliss, especially with math.

“Reluctant reader” is another phrase I hear my wife say, and it was fun to see f I could make a cartoon out of it. Also, those books in the background were fun to draw.

For a while it seemed like infographics were everywhere, but they’re either dying down or I’ve seen so many I’m ignoring them now. I suspect the latter.

This education cartoon came out around Valentine’s Day, and it’s one of those where you wonder what the back story is. At least I do.

I disagree.

I was sure someone had done this cartoon, but I searched online and never found it. Still, someone’s had to have done this already, right?

I’d like to read that sentence.

Most of my education cartoons are based in elementary schools, but I do try to do more high school themed cartoon occasionally.

PLC is the acronym for Professional Learning Community. According to Wikipedia they are:

…an extended learning opportunity to foster collaborative learning among colleagues within a particular work environment or field. It is often used in schools as a way to organize teachers into working groups.

My wife really likes it, and it was a fun challenge to do a PLC cartoon, but if you don’t know what that is, then this probably isn’t that funny.

I tried to make the two handwritings different in this, but even my left-handed penmanship isn’t too bad. Sigh…

This field trip cartoon was so much fun to draw, and I got to work in comic books to boot! WOO!

Place value is one of those terms I think you forget about later in life. Unless you marry a teacher that is.

I try to vary my education cartoon cast to include nurses, counselors, and, in this case, a librarian.

OK, last one…

So that’s it! Hope you enjoyed these education cartoons, and hope you have a great school year!

Teacher Cartoons For Teacher Appreciation Week

May 7, 2012January 10, 2017 andertoons2 Comments

It’s Teacher Appreciation Week, so I thought I’d share a bunch of my teacher cartoons to thank all the educators out there (my lovely wife included) for all of their hard work! Enjoy:

I hear a lot from my wife about kids that are approaching standards, meeting standards, exceeding standards, etc… So this cartoon was sort of a no-brainer.

I was originally going to do this cartoon as a piano teacher one, but I thought band directors might appreciate a cartoon too. (BTW, I know there’s also alto clef, tenor clef, etc… but for the purpose of this joke I just stuck to treble and bass.)

I hear my wife talk about her lesson plans a lot, so it was really fun to draw this bedraggled looking teacher being comforted by one of her students.

Copier manufacturers, I know schools make a lot of copies, but copiers have been around for a good while now. How about making one that doesn’t break down once a week? Please?

Another take on standards; I think “standoffish” makes this work for me.

As a parent I certainly have opinions about my kids’ education, but I try not to go quite this far.

I probably spent a good half hour looking at formulas I thought might be readable as some sort of texting acronym (LOL, WTF, etc…). Any thoughts on what that might stand for?

Being the husband of a teacher I’ve spent some time in teachers’ lounges, and lemme tell you, comfy they’re not. So why the lounge moniker?

Dogs eating homework seems so last century. Do they eat PowerPoints and PDFs now?

Ah… Periodic table humor…

Listening to my wife talk about school sometimes is exhausting because so much of it is acronyms. I try to keep up, but I think they mint new ones daily. Help!

I’m proud to say that my permission slip signing record is perfect so far.

This cartoon took a while to figure out. I had the drawing first, but the caption came really slowly. It wasn’t until I thought “why is he giving her so many options” that it finally clicked – it doesn’t really matter why, just that he did.

I’m not much of a mashup kind of guy. It’s not that I don’t appreciate a good one, I just prefer to create content from scratch the old-fashioned way.

My daughter just got a guinea pig for her birthday, so a class pet cartoon wasn’t far behind.

There’s a lot of educational theories and approaches out there. Currently there seems to be a lot of emphasis on almost constant positive reinforcement. Which is fine I guess, but it was pretty much begging for a cartoon like this one.

I remember doing a lot of simplifying back in the day, and I always wondered if there was some guy in a room somewhere taking basic math and just making it harder. Needless to say math was not my strongest subject.

I like this kid’s thinking.

We didn’t have homework folders when I was a kid, but now they seem to be all the educational rage. Call me a traditionalist, but the old backpack stuffed with crinkled papers works just fine, thank you!

Drawing this poor tired teacher is some of the most fun I’ve had drawing in some time.

To quote Daffy Duck, “pronoun trouble.”

I’m proud to say this actually is not the only photosynthesis cartoon I’ve done!

I tend to stay away from politics in my cartoons, but this one is non-specific enough that I’m OK with it.

I’m honestly really curious what this kid wrote about.

Another cartoon that I researched a bit. I’d originally had more text about The Renaissance on the board, but decided that it read better if you weren’t distracted by more text.

Semicolons are funny. They just are.

Well, that’s it. I hope you enjoyed them all! Feel free to check out all of my teacher cartoons, and happy Teacher Appreciation Week everyone!

Teacher Cartoons

August 9, 2011January 10, 2017 andertoons

You know it’s not too much longer and summer’s going to be over and parents everywhere will alternately cry and dance for joy as their kids head back to school.

It’s especially dramatic at my house because my wife is a teacher. So one day the house is filled with family, and the next it’s crickets chirping.

Anyway, with school just over the horizon I thought I’d share some of my favorite teacher cartoons! Enjoy:

I don’t know exactly how apples apparently became the preferred bribe for educators everywhere, but I’m betting that they’ve lost their luster. BTW, for those students of my wife, here’s a hint: forget the coffee and go the chocolate route. Works like a charm!

I remember meeting with my kids preschool teachers a ways back and examining their scissors skills. I had no idea there even was such a thing! I’ve heard my wife discuss fine and gross motor skills, but I had no idea that I’d be looking closely at partially hacked construction paper with other adults and creating a cutting improvement strategy.

Anyway, I’m also a bit of a tech nerd, so this cartoon wasn’t far behind.

I know for a fact that this cartoon is very popular with teachers, but none of them will ever admit it.

Again with the apples! To be fair this cartoon isn’t really a stretch to get to, but I did put a lot of thought into the look of the classroom. (This is where having a teacher for a wife really comes in handy!) There’s the alphabet strip above the whiteboard, the curvy corrugated border on the bulletin board, the calendar… None of which are strictly necessary, and I normally try to imply backgrounds more, but it was too much fun to resist.

Well, there you go. Just a few quick examples of my teacher cartoons. If you’d like to see more, feel free to click here and browse to your heart’s content.

Bonus! Here’s q short video of teacher cartoons I did a while back:

Free Cartoon Day – Teacher/Education

September 10, 2010September 11, 2010 andertoons

free cartoon day

Hooray! It’s Free Cartoon Day! And this week the cartoon is a teacher/education cartoon:

So, how do you get the cartoon? Easy! Just ~~click on the cartoon~~, or ~~click here~~, to go to the large image of the cartoon. Do that right click "Save as…" thingy and you’re good to go!

Remember though, this is only free today. Tomorrow the links above won’t work. But don’t worry, the cartoon will be available at Andertoons at standard pricing right away.

See you next Friday for another free cartoon!

UPDATE – Sorry, this cartoon is no longer available for free, but it is available for purchase by clicking here. And feel free to check out all of my other teacher & education cartoons here.

Cartooning Q & A (To Mr. Sergi’s Class)

April 16, 2010January 20, 2012 andertoons

Recently I received an email from 5th grade art teacher, Mr. Sergi. He said he does a unit on cartoons and his students are curious about tools of the trade, career info, publishing norms, etc…

I’ve actually meant to do a post like this for a while, so for kids out there interested in cartooning as a career, here’s the quick and dirty on my process and experience:

Materials

Every artist is different and I recommend that you play with as many pencils, pens, papers, or whatever as much as you can. It probably took me a good two years to find the tools I use now, but putting in that time is part of finding your style. I know cartoonists using pencil, crayon, ink & pen, and ball point on papers ranging from watercolor to copier quality.

But, since you asked, I use Faber-Castell Pitt brush pens and Prismacolor cool gray markers on Borden & Riley bleedproof marker paper. I still do all of the art the old fashioned way, but of course I use my computer for scanning, cleanup, and playing Hordes of Orcs.

Writing

You of course need to be a decent artist to be a cartoonist, but even more important is the writing. Good writing can carry bad art, but not the other way around. Study comedy and figure out how it works. And once you’ve done that, edit yourself well. Brevity is wit.

Dimensions

“How big should I draw my cartoons?” is a question every beginning cartoonist asks. If you’re looking to be a comic strip cartoonist, you’ll want to look at the dimensions of current strips and size that up as needed. For gag cartooning (what I do), or web cartooning, there’s really no preset dimensions to worry about. Just draw as much or as little as you need to get the joke across.

Art

Everyone’s style is going to be different, and I don’t think you necessarily need to go to art school to be a cartoonist, but you do need to draw well enough so your cartoon reads quickly and effectively. The best advice I can give is to draw constantly; it doesn’t get any simpler than that. The more you draw, the more happy accidents occur and your individual style emerges. Draw, draw, draw, eat a sandwich, then keep drawing.

Markets

Newspapers are having a rough time of it, and magazines aren’t doing a lot better. Where I used to make most of my living selling to traditional print, most of my income now comes from selling my cartoons online. Where will cartoonists earn their livings in the near future? It’s hard to say, but don’t believe anyone who tells you you can’t earn a living at it. Do good work, do a lot of it, and keep an open mind.

So that’s cartooning in a nutshell for me. I hope you and your teacher get something you can use out of this, and I wish you all kinds of luck cartooning. I can’t think of a job that’s better than drawing funny pictures all day.