dreadedcandiru2 | Entries tagged with phil versus understanding children

One of the odder things about having to read Phil's biography is his being described as having a mercurial temperament. The dictionary definition of this is, of course, "characterized by rapid and unpredictable changeableness of mood." The definition that presents itself when confronted with Phil's actual behaviour is "being an infantile idiot who is only happy when things are going exactly his way" because he's great company as long as no one puts any sort of obstacle in the way of getting what he wants, damn the rights, wants and needs of everyone else. The reason that I mention this is the irritating habit he has of describing Mike as devious and fiendish for not immediately understanding something that took him years to master. This makes Mister Mercurial yet another idiot adult who expects immediate perfection from a mere child when he himself spent years honing his craft.

This is not a good situation for the boy because he has two imbecile parents who combine perfectionism with an appalling refusal to admit that expecting instant excellence from him is perhaps logically unsound and morally questionable. Worse, they share with Phil the logically unsustainable and inhumanely stupid idea that since they themselves are no longer children, the fear, confusion and depression they themselves felt have been abolished forever so any claim that he feels lost and overwhelmed is a horrible lie calculated to trick them into feeling bad about an ungrateful wretch who doesn't have nearly enough stress in his life.

It becomes worse when you remember that these are the least organized set of imbeciles to ever have lived. We thus not only have to deal with the Mike of the Early and Middle Years being hectored to lift higher than the person screaming about weakness, laziness and selfishness can lift, carry more than an adult can carry and work for more time than a grown man can, he also has to run around in circles like an imbecile because of the mercurial demands on his time. The end result of all of this is that he has a verkakte work ethic that confuses quantity with quality. This habit of his of taking pride in churning out abysmal nonsense by the terabyte is akin to how it's probably a dead certainty that Elly's last thoughts will be of how great it is that she did all that laundry ineptly and how vigorous she was in the pointless task of sweeping a back porch no one sees.

As you might or might not know, the consensus on the Rate-my-teacher site about Alan is that he's a nice guy outside the classroom but not the best teacher in the world inside of it. The entry that most concerned me was the one in which a student discussed his tendency to, when told that his explanation of something is less than clear, is to explain things the exact same confusing way but slower. What this suggests is that instead of realizing "Hey! This person might have no idea of what I'm talking about. I'd better explain it in terms he or she can actually understand," we might be dealing with a situation in which he channels Bill From Bala and says "This kid has got to know what I'm talking about because I do and is thus just trying to trick me!!!"

This sort of helps to explain what sort of teacher Phil might actually be: the same sort of catastrophic failure Liz would become. Let's examine the most telling line in his Liography:

It didn't help his mood any that the incoming Grade 7 class was made up of the most fiendish lot of kids ever inflicted on a suffering world, with about as much music in the lot of them as in an average turnip. Their mothers were worse. The principal of the school was an idiot, always on his case grumping about discipline.

and translate it from "Angry, immature beatnik who should stick to teaching civics where he won't be a total embarrasmment" to "Sane human being."

For starters, the crack about the kids being fiends trying to torment him makes as much real-world sense as his ill-informed comment about how devious Mike is. Unlike him, we know that Mike isn't making it up when he feels as if he's joining the kid who drowned in the slurry pit in Apaches. We also know that Elly's "support" consists of making trumpet lessons feel less fun than the Bataan Death March. We even know what a condescending, intimidating, temperamental and demanding jackass Phil is when his temper flares up so it's obvious as all Hell that he'd decided to give up on the lot of them sight unseen because he was in a bad mood owing to the wedding planning that was going on at the same time making the poor baby-man feel like he was being ground up in Georgia's machine.

The part about how the children's parents were a blight on existence clearly sent from Hell to torment him is equally telling. As

howtheduck tells us, it's vital to maintain good relations with the parents of your students if you want to have any sort of successful music program. Crapping all over them, mansplaining and treating them like nuisances because they didn't have his credentials seems to indicate that Phil had brought a Hell of a lot of his trouble on his own damned stupid, arrogant self.

To that end, so does randomly damning authority figures as being imbeciles because they blame him for his own dubious human resource management skills. What his whiny, self-justifying remark about how he's being tormented tells me is the same thing his vile and disgusting comment about Georgia being a schemer trying to unman him because his fragile male ego can't handle having to give instead of take says: we're dealing with an over-grown child who blames other people for the mess he makes when he's being a sulking asshole. It's sort of too bad that we're supposed to side with him and all the other alleged adults in this strip when they're so obviously in the wrong. More on that tomorrow.

I should think that most of you have at one point or another watched an episode of the Red Green Show on PBS and have noticed that despite the fact that most of it is recorded on video tape, there's always a black-and-white silent film segment called "Adventures with Bill" and wondered why Red had Harold use a film camera with a poor-quality microphone. As it turns out, the reason for this is that Adventure Bill didn't always hang out at Possum Lodge; he started out as someone named "Bill From Bala" that the actor had created for an improv troupe called "The Frantics."

Back then, he wasn't there to be a human cartoon character getting injured for our amusement; back when he was live on stage, he was established as something of a rocket-jawed small-town irritant who used any sort of opening to waste people's time blathering away witlessly about every thought he'd ever had since he figured out which end of his digestive tract smelled worse and what he mostly wanted to talk about is his home town of Bala, Ontario. This being a pub bore sucking the oxygen out of the room by going on a torrent-of-consciousness rant about the minor doings of average people in a sleepy little place where nothing spectacular ever happens or ever will would be bad enough in and of itself were it not for Bill's insistence that his victim had to know and love the place as much as he does. Until the person inevitably blows up and bellows about how little he cares about a place he's never heard of, it doesn't seem to occur to Bill that no, the person might not even have actually heard about Bala and might not actually care and above all might actually like to be left in peace instead of listening to a boring old git who doesn't shut up because he's too stupid to realize he's being a pain in the arse. This turns him into the male equivalent of a mother who insists that her adult daughter MUST have gone to a wedding she never attended, met people she doesn't know exist and done any number of other things that she never did and is simply being difficult and perverse merely to aggravate her poor, long-suffering mother.

The reason that I told you about Bill is that his failure to quite get that merely because he knows about Bala, it doesn't necessarily follow that everyone else in the world wants to listen to a non-stop rant about the place is that it not only explains why Red bought a camera with a broken microphone to save his sanity, it seems to me that most of the characters in the strip have his major malfunction. As by way of example, most of the reason that tetchy idiot Phil thinks Mike is tricking him is that he simply cannot seem to understand that Mike wasn't born knowing what his uncle is talking about.

As I said a while back, Phil isn't nearly as effective as a teacher as he can be because he fails to understand that he cannot apply the Henry Ford principle to music education. Despite his clear belief otherwise, children aren't robots he can install a love of music into but members of families, peer groups and an outside world that can't help but influence their readiness to learn.

We get to see an annoying example of this trend when he totally fails to understand why it is that Mike is so discouraged by the realization that there are things he'll never be the best at. What he sees (and what Elly encourages him to see) is some melodramatic kid who's got it in his head that people who are trying to help him are actually cruel monsters who simply pile on high expectation after high expectation because they love to see him miserable. As I said before, Phil doesn't quite see that Elly's idea of support is to stonewall any attempt at reassurance and keep absolutely quiet when she's pleased because she's trying to save him. What he also doesn't realize is something he only rarely sees: Mike has never been the most melodramatic idiot in the strip.

Sure, the Delicate Genius is pretty good at making a meal of made-up atrocities what with his imbecilic overreaction to Rhetta suggesting that they go on break but that's child's play compared to all the wailing Elly does about every little thing that goes wrong. Phil might get the occasional glimpse that she hasn't grown out of standing around living rooms jabbing her finger in the air and running her fool mouth about injustice but he falsely ascribes that tendency to extreme circumstances. He's never around long enough to see Elly go full on crazy about burst milk bags, mislaid glasses and rolled eyes.

Then again, it probably wouldn't matter if he did. As I said, he's pretty much on the same page as Sparky was when he laid pretty much all the blame for Farley dying twenty years ago on April and only considered the role of the parents as something of an afterthought that tangentially has to do with the problem. According to those two geniuses, the people who control the kids' lives aren't to be blamed for the kids' failings.