Miss Lenhart

Miss Lenhart
First appearance	59: Graduation
Appearances	99

For a list of comics, see Comics featuring Miss Lenhart.

Miss Lenhart is a stick figure character in xkcd. She is most often used as a math teacher and a news anchor, but is often featured in the background of other comics when Randall needs additional characters. Like most other xkcd characters, she does not necessarily represent the same character from comic to comic. She is distinguished by her long blonde hair. In 1817: Incognito Mode, her hair is significantly more detailed.

Roles

Miss Lenhart is mainly just another woman that Randall can use when he wishes to give a woman a specific characteristic so to set her aside from the more commonly used women Megan and Ponytail. The hacker Mrs. Roberts is another minor characters who has the same appearance as Miss Lenhart.

Math teacher

Miss Lenhart as a math teacher

Miss Lenhart is the go-to character when Randall needs a teacher. There are several cases where Miss Lenhart is described as a math teacher. Her name is used in this context in her first comic 135: Substitute, and she is both named and drawn in 1050: Forgot Algebra as a math teacher. She is also teaching mathematics in 263: Certainty, 622: Haiku Proof, 1724: Proofs, and 2605: Taylor Series.

Her career appears to closely follow the trajectory of a public-school math teacher at either the middle or high school level as teachers become subject specific at that point. Teacher's lounges and substitutes are also features of the North American secondary school system. In 1519: Venus and 803: Airfoil she is seen teaching two non-math science related classes, which is something else that happens in American schools due to a general shortage of qualified STEM teachers.

In 1519: Venus, it is confirmed that Miss Lenhart is one month away from retirement (which is shown to result in taking her teaching duties less seriously. Being forced to teach outside her subject matter expertise (Earth/Environmental Science instead of Math) may have factored into her decision, but regardless, public sector teachers in the United States generally still earn pensions and are able to retire earlier than other workers.

After 1519: Venus, we see Miss Lenhart transition to college level material such as 2028: Complex Numbers, 2545: Bayes' Theorem, 2560: Confounding Variables and 2283: Exa-Exabyte. If she did in fact retire early from public secondary school education, it would be possible for her to supplement her pension as an adjunct professor teaching college level science and math courses at a community or state institution of higher education, despite teaching grammar in 3229: Grammar.

In some early comics, such as 435: Purity and 599: Apocalypse, Miss Lenhart is portrayed as a mathematician. However, in 1985: Meteorologist she is explicitly not into mathematics and instead has a Linguistics degree under her belt.

News anchor

Miss Lenhart as a news anchor

Cueball and Miss Lenhart are the most used character for presenting news reports in the role of a news anchor, but Cueball is used more often than her.

Mother

Miss Lenhart appears to be the wife of a Cueball-like character in 275: Thoughts. In 416: Zealous Autoconfig and 342: 1337: Part 2, both Miss Lenhart and Mrs. Roberts are portrayed as mothers with at least two children. Miss Lenhart is also depicted as a mother in a few other comics, such as:

• 200: Bill Nye, with two boys.
• 275: Thoughts, having a daughter.
• 946: Family Decals, left family wagon with three children, two boys and a girl.
• 1608: Hoverboard, next to the volcano where she is with her daughter. The boy might be the daughter's friend or her brother.

Name

Miss Lenhart is a minor character in xkcd, but has had several appearances without ever being named in general. In fact, she has only been named twice where she is actually drawn. The first time she's named is in her second appearance, 135: Substitute. The first time she is both drawn and mentioned by name is in 499: Scantron, and the only other time (so far by comic 1731) is in 1050: Forgot Algebra. But her name was used before for a not-shown teacher in 135: Substitute, which is why it makes sense to call the math teacher in 263: Certainty Miss Lenhart. That would thus make it the first time she appeared as a character in a comic.

Her family name is again the only thing used in 416: Zealous Autoconfig, although there it does not directly say that she is a teacher. While school is mentioned, it is for her children. Thus, the name is first connected directly to the blonde teacher in her fifth "appearance" after she was also drawn in 442: xkcd Loves the Discovery Channel.

Later, her name is used again without her being present, except on the phone in 704: Principle of Explosion. Here, she is Mrs. Lenhart. It is possible that this character is the mother of Miss Lenhart. Or, because she here obviously has a son, she may have been married after she was originally named Miss. This is the second time she has been mentioned to be a mother. Both Miss Lenhart and one of the other named Miss Lenhart-like character Mrs. Roberts is shown to be a mother. In 2808: Daytime Firefly, the off-screen character of "Ms. Lenhart" is mentioned in the title text (in an imagined conversation with a male teacher) who could be this main character, if not just one or other of her relatives.

Her name is mentioned in total six times. So, the other comics with Miss Lenhart refer to a teacher with her appearance, just like Megan only has been named a few times but is still used to describe the general dark-haired woman. However, Miss Lenhart must have long blonde hair, so a teacher with her hair in a ponytail, like in 982: Set Theory, is not Miss Lenhart but Ponytail, even though the teaching method reminds of the one in 1724: Proofs with Miss Lenhart.