I want to preface this by saying this teacher used to be my favorite teacher. He was really good about talking to our level, but not treating us like little kids (this was the seventh grade). You could have an adult conversation with him and he was good about engaging the class.

So anyway, for History class we had this project about the Canada Home Children. For those not in the know, while Canada was still a British colony in the 17th century, the government started this program where colonists in the Canadian territory could adopt British children from orphanages to help on their land. In practice, this meant that people were ‘adopting’ unwanted children so they could have cheap labour. In class we learned that the kids were treated basically as slaves and typically went through lots of abuses.

At the end of the term we had this project where we had to summarize the typical child’s experience. For my project I decided I was going to make a satirical comic. I drew several strips that each detailed something we learned about in class. I remember a kid getting lost overboard on an overcrowded passenger ship, one getting frozen solid in ice because of the harsh Canadian winter, and another being made to eat a raw turnip while the rest of the family was having a Christmas dinner.

My teacher gave me a D for the project because he said it was disrespectful to the children.

I went to a lot of effort for this project, really went above and beyond because I love comics. I felt I was showing the abuses the kids had gone through, and I thought the comics were funny but tasteful. I also felt that it was pretty clear that since I’m drawing the abuses of literal friggin’ children it went without saying that I was also condemning the program as inhumane.

We had a parent/teacher meeting about it because I’d never gotten such a low grade in my life. And I was pretty upset too, I worked hard on this thing. My teacher goes on to explain that if you have to be careful with this kind of thing, because satire is tricky to get right without offending people. He then goes on to talk about A Modest Proposal, a satirical essay from around the same time where the author proposes that since the Irish were having a famine they should just eat their babies. He was talking about this as if it was the appropriate way to do satire.

My dad asked how my cartoon about abuse was any different from a story about eating babies. My teacher didn’t have an answer, but I still had a D

In hindsight, the story did teach me a pretty valuable lesson. If you’re going to make satire, you’re going to offend people, and you’re probably going to suffer for it. I like to think he was trying to teach me that there are stakes for speaking against injustice, and you have to be willing to accept that people are going to be critical or dismissive of you. But if you’ve offended someone with your satire, then… that’s kind of the point. Anyway, I’m happier thinking there was some lesson to it other than him just being a jerk about my project