Another Brilliant Student Blogger: Beatrice’s 30-page Comic Life Satire on Grade Mania

Sunday, 16 March 2008 Clay Burell Print This Post

If I’m sharing a lot of student bloggers on Beyond School lately, it’s because we only launched our high school-wide blogging program back in mid-January. Two short months later, I’m seeing sparks of genius here and there.

Here’s another one: A 30-page Comic Life comic book from Beatrice. I featured it in my presentation at the Apple Distinguished Educator Institute in Bangkok back in December (video here), but at that time, it was locked in a private class Ning. With the help of my Twitter network – particularly Scott Meech in Chicago and Adrian Bruce in northern New South Wales, Australia – I was able to find a WordPress plugin that creates full-screen slideshows of Flickr photo sets. Beatrice exported her Comic Life pages as jpegs, uploaded them to Flickr as a set, and embedded the set as a slideshow in this post on her blog. I can’t recommend the comic highly enough: it’s a satire on the GPA mania of parents and schools, and its destructive effects on parents and children alike. Both the plot and the graphic design – not to mention the imagination – are first-rate. And this girl is a mere 15.

Here are a couple teaser shots. Follow this link to the full book, and also browse Beatrice’s showcase of paintings and photoshop illustrations for a glimpse of the non-verbal potential of student blogging. Beatrice’s dominant intelligence, she tells me, is visual. And she gets how ideal blogs can be to showcase her portfolio.

Be sure to leave her a comment. And by the way, this copyrighted material is used by permission from the artist.

I’m so glad we aren’t using the blogs as prescriptive homework assignments. The things we discover about these individuals we lump into the “student” label can be wonderfully surprising, when they have the freedom to post what they choose.

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The entry 'Another Brilliant Student Blogger: Beatrice’s 30-page Comic Life Satire on Grade Mania' was posted on March 16th, 2008 at 2:50 am and last modified on March 17th, 2008 at 12:04 am, and is filed under blogging, creativity, language arts, project-based learning, school reform, student 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to “Another Brilliant Student Blogger: Beatrice’s 30-page Comic Life Satire on Grade Mania”

diane writes:
No. 1 — March 16th, 2008 at 4:21 am
Beatrice demonstrated Student Voice at its finest. The sequence where the tutor removed dreams from the boy’s heart really affected me, and I will leave a message on her blog to tell her so.

Thanks for introducing us to this talented young woman.

diane

diane’s last blog post..A Heavy Armor

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Eric Grant writes:
No. 2 — March 16th, 2008 at 5:37 am
clay – thanks for another great tip. i love this work.

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Pat writes:
No. 3 — March 16th, 2008 at 6:13 am
Saw the whole thing and it was awesome! We need to encourage young people like this to expand their wings so i’m glad she has you to encourage her!

Pat’s last blog post..Useful Information In and Out of the Classroom 03/14/08

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