Jesse Bloggs

My protégé Clave’s high school The Met had a dinner Wednesday night honoring their student’s mentors. It’s always nice to be appreciated, but the evening offered several special moments.

The first was merely learning more about The Met’s internship program, which is really quite innovative and interesting. Invented to create greater student investment in learning, all of the school’s students must have a mentor. The students’ work with their mentor constitutes a major part of their grade, and through that work they are expected to learn about traditional high school subjects (English, math, science, etc) in untraditional ways. I’m certainly not schooling young Clave in everything a high school graduate is expected to know, but besides becoming a better cartoonist Clave is also sharpening his analytical skills in his reading assignments and learning the sort of math skills required in everyday life by pricing his soon-to-be-self-published mini-comics. For those interested in learning more about the program, a student and mentor from Clave’s school were recently interviewed on the Capital Public Radio program Insight, which can be listened to here.

Appropriately, the mentor appreciation dinner was catered and put on in part by The Met’s students. For the most part the night went well, but of course there were a few moments of intended, and unintended, hilarity. For intended hilarity, Clave gave me a thank you card that continued the theme of the Christmas card given to me by him and his family in which he depicted himself with an enlarged, Akira-style head with the caption, “Thanks for letting me drain you of your knowledge.” The card Clave gave me last night can be seen below.

As for unintended hilarity, The Met gave me a certificate calling me, “Jesse Baggs of Independent Cartoonist.” As proud as I am to be one of the few non-corporate individuals on the list of mentors, couldn’t someone have caught this grammatical error? Aren’t there any aspiring copy editors at The Met?

But the funniest moment of the night was when one of Clave’s friends came to the table and Clave introduced him to “my parents, my mentor Jesse and his girlfriend Audrey.” Visibly excited, the young man said, “Of course you’re someone’s girlfriend. You’re too unattractive to be single.” There was a moment of awkward confusion before we realized he had meant, “too attractive,” not “too unattractive.” Then we were all just awkward.

Ah, high school. No matter how progressive and innovative, it’s still uncomfortable.