Legacy 2: Reading Despite Teaching (or, How the Hulk Led Me to Hamlet)
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Reading Despite Teaching
or,
How the hulk led me to Hamlet
Artifact: 1976 Killraven Comic Book (final issue)
Date: 1969-1980
Cultural Element: Education: Standardized Curriculum; Aesthetics of Class: ‘High’ v. ‘Pop’ Culture
Commentary:
Old Skull (seated) and Killraven on Lookout Mountain
I was born to a middle class family of Tennessee and Alabama origins, and raised in a house with few books (okay, we had a family Bible on dusty display; a lonely edition of Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet I found shoved out of mind in my father’s closet, and enjoyed; a set of Encyclopedia Britannica and another of The Great Books that I imagine some salesman twisted my parents’ arms to buy for the sake of their children’s educations and of 1950s middle-class respectability and which, oddly enough, we enjoyed rummaging through as children).
My schools had books in the library, which I recall using briefly in fifth grade to read a series of boys’ action mysteries and a few baseball dramas—but overall, school libraries meant homework, and homework meant no play, and play was fun and homework wasn’t. In short, I didn’t read books because I didn’t like what they were associated with: reports.
I did, however, read comic books. Devoured them. The X-Men, the Fantastic Four, the Avengers, Thor, Spiderman…these and other titles constituted my first library. I started reading them in grade school, under my big brother’s influence, and evolved into a connoisseur. I knew the names and styles of the authors and illustrators, the colorists, even the letterers. I suffered when my favorite titles underwent changes in writers or artists. Would the new team maintain the character subtleties and personalities I’d come to love from their predecessors? Could the new artist match the galactic or subatomic vistas the old one drew me into? Would Valhalla still sparkle? Would Daredevil’s deltoids still look so cool?
The first of every month was an event to pine for, because that was when the new issues hit the racks. I made pilgrimages three miles on foot to the nearest convenience store to buy or, funds being unavailable, steal the latest installments. Keeping them in mint condition was important: I would roll seven or eight comics into a cylinder and slide them very carefully into my sock and under my pants-leg, carefully walk to the cashier to pay for one other one, then hobble stiff-legged behind the store and uncoil my loot from my legs, checking for damage.
The hours of reading these books in my room once back home were my earliest experience of that reader’s pleasure known as “flow.” Everything environmental disappeared, everything personal, emotional, physical. I recall one month reading an episode of an obscure but brilliant title based on War of the Worlds called Killraven, which happened to be set on Lookout Mountain…in Chattanooga, my home town. I was elated to discover that my locale was known to the authors, that it had significance, that I belonged to a larger world.
Better still, it was the only comic I recall ever reading that attained such aesthetic heights that I wept and wept: Old Skull, the bald, brawny, but kindly and simple sidekick to Killraven—very much a sort of loyal Kent to Killraven’s Lear—enjoys an idyllic moment appreciating butterflies and childishly chatting to squirrels by a mountain stream (my mountain!). It is lyrical perfection, it brings fond laughter, and the illustrations are so lovely…I remember the artist’s name, P. Craig Russel, and his ornate and elegant art nouveau signature on the title page of every issue, and I haven’t seen or discussed these books since the late ‘70s…and then there is a sound from the forest that breaks Old Skull’s reverie, and out steps a Martian who breaks all conventional comic serial rules by killing a main character. Old Skull died on Lookout Mountain, and I wept on its foothills.
My Favorite Artist in high school: Craig Russel, Illustrator of Killraven
My neighborhood friends (also Killraven fans) and I could not get over our amazement at all of this. We often discussed the stories from the Marvel Universe, but this was the high point. (It turns out Old Skull could be killed because Killraven’s circulation was so low, attempting as it did to pioneer new territory in comics, that it was discontinued with this issue.)
I would hope that the pedagogical implications of my formative experience with reading are self-evident: My public school’s curriculum and pedagogy failed to make me a reader. I became a reader despite, not because of, book reports and assigned readings. This is the strongest personal confirmation I can offer of the value of free voluntary reading time at school, and of letting the students bond with whatever literature appeals to them—and I hope I’ve succeeded at showing that Killraven, for instance, was literature. The experience of flow is part of what lifelong readers read for; it constitutes one of the central aesthetic pleasures of reading (traditional aestheticians describe it as ‘absorption’ of the self by the work of art; politically suspect as this may be, I think its an essential stage of aesthetic development); and I believe it should be the primary aim of reading classes. Once students have experienced that, their desire to repeat that experience will motivate them to read for the rest of their lives. I soon graduated to science fiction in high school, and dropped comics altogether in college in favor of a new Valhalla containing my new gods: Homer, Shakespeare, Milton, Keats, Wilde, and Nietzsche—all owing to my start in comics. Only after reading for flow creates the reading habit will exercises in critical reading and writing about/of literature be significant for them, as opposed to aversive exercises to be dashed off as quickly as possible in order to do other, ‘fun,’ things.
The fact that I remember the authors and artists of these comics, and was critically aware of their stylistic differences without ever doing homework about them, further suggests that even critical reading skills develop independent of instruction. The fact that I remember Old Skull’s death scene so vividly—more so than most books I was ever assigned in my education, college included—almost thirty years later is a revelation even to me. And traditionalists, take note: as a child, I very likely would have enjoyed writing a report on this scene, if only I’d been invited. I never was.
A multicultural note of a different sort—because pop culture could be seen as a multicultural category—is the significance of my personal-local connection to the story I described. This encounter in text with my own soil and sky—could this be why I haven’t forgotten it like I have practically all the other comics I read? This can’t be known. But there’s no doubting the intensifying effect this local-cultural connection had on my relation to the text. This points yet again to the vital importance of student choice and relevance in reading curricula.
Finally, my public school teachers probably had no idea that their desperate attempts to make us students engage in sincere reflection about books through book reports were so futile because we were naturally reflecting on our own cultural texts in authentic social reading groups—normally in the woods in our neighborhood. If my goal as a language arts teacher is to make good book-reporters of my kids, then I should keep assigning book reports; but if I want to make them lifelong readers who read like we adults do—we read books and discuss them with others—I’ll allow authentic book chats in class.
[Part 2 in the autobiographical "Web Legacies" series. Part 1: Ambivalent Apostasy (or, Fear and Trembling at Camp Joy)]
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For the most part, I have always disagreed with assigned reading - sure, it gets people actually processing the text, but if it’s a book they hate, then they’re going to fight every inch of it. And rightly so.
I’m interested to learn what some strategies you have for making assigned reading fun are.
Oh, umm… “networkchallenge”.
Please reply,
/gradster(1)/
/gradster(1)/s last blog post..Knight Spent Fighting Crime
/gradster(1)/
30 Jul 08 at 3:56 am
Interesting ideas, Clay; I like your observations on the power of locality in fiction. Whenever I travel, I always try to read some fiction centered on the place I’ll be going, both before and after the trip; I’ve found that the practice creates an interesting synergy, illuminating both the story and the place.
I can see how being able to identify with one’s own locality in fiction would be a powerful draw, especially to younger readers. In a sense, it’s a return to the spoken, informal narrative, often (though by no means always) crafted by one’s own people about one’s own place. We want a certain amount of familiarity in our stories.
Written fiction offers powerful leverage to distribute a story across space and time, but (like all mass-produced products) at the cost of personalization. A lot of fiction (especially regional fiction) deals with this by making the location one of the characters, getting mileage out of fascination in the exotic and the Other. Preliterate stories did this, too, of course (Odyssey, anyone?), but they were and are also able to anchor things in the familiar. Ghost stories may be the apotheosis of this anchoring: “And it happened in these very woods…”.
So anyways, I wonder if that’s part of Killraven’s draw. Although I wouldn’t underestimate the power of great art, either…I’ve always been in awe of some of the great comic book artists’ illustration skills, and I think it’s real shame that both the stories and art in comic books (and I’m so glad you resisted the desperately-clutching-for-respectability “graphic novel” appelation) have always gotten such critical short shrift.
Although perhaps the future may be different…I know the ALA has been doing more stuff with comic books, partly driven by the popularity of Manga. There’s been some literature on how comic books may be a sort of gateway drug to more serious fiction. I’ve also seen some literature realizing that comics have value in their own right–and end, not just a means–as well.
Jason Priems last blog post..79% of oft-cited statistics are total garbage
Jason Priem
30 Jul 08 at 4:36 am
@Gradster I’ll have to point you to the language arts category in my sidebar to look at some examples of ways I’ve tried to make reading assigned works more engaging (or the “teaching gallery” page up top). The problem is, it’s a bear for a teacher to manage a totally free reading approach, as I’m sure you can imagine.
@Jason, Nice remarks. They sort of link to the post a few days ago questioning whether “Local collaboration” is maybe preferable to “Global.”
As for Killraven, I was hooked by it for over a year before they journeyed through my hometown in their last episode. The art was definitely a factor, but so was the writing and characterization (and it was based on _The War of the Worlds_, too, so it had a decent plot frame).
I haven’t read many graphic novels (and without meaning to quibble, I find the term useful to distinguish between a “novel”-length comic and a 20-page “comic book”), but I did teach V for Vendetta at the end of grade 9 last year, as a followup to Animal Farm - a sort of “AF for the 21st C. Surveillance Society” hook, which I think Cory Doctorow’s new _Little Brother_ would do even better. But I LOVED _V_ - and it was hard for my students to get.
Glad to see you mention Krashen (check out his _The Power of Reading_ too), whom I was too lazy to reference. The PoR research is a bit old, and I don’t know if comics are as textually dense as they were in my teen ’70s, but his plug of comics as a way of developing vocab and syntactic skill is spot-on for me. It’s clear to anybody who looks at comics with fresh eyes. I had a strong vocab in hs, and it came from comics and sci-fi.
Stay tuned for the next Legacy post, re: that “Comics as a Gateway Drug to Literature” bit.
Thanks for stopping by.
Clay Burell
30 Jul 08 at 6:07 am
Ironic for me that I encountered your post in the public library with a stack of X-Men and Batman comics next to me. I have enountered some powerful graphic novels that have changed the way I see the world- “Blankets,” “Pride of Bagdad,” “The Castaways” to name a few. I agree that Little Brother would go well with V for Vendetta (I doubt my school would pay for a class set of g.n. though.)
As I was reading I tried to think of books, stories, comics even that have transported me and shaped my reading, and I thought of my 12th grade English teacher (Ms. George- with whom I think I was secretly in love) and how she introduced me to Keats, Byron, Shelley, and Shakespeare. That one class (I think I maxed out at a C) changed me and shaped the course of my life. Why else did I think teaching English would be fun? I fell in love with poetry then and even deluded myself that I could write the stuff. Silly rabbit.
Thanks for these posts.
Paul Vs last blog post..What’s the buzz? Tell me what’sa happenin’
Paul V
30 Jul 08 at 9:21 am
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31 Jul 08 at 12:36 am
Random thoughts:
-I was allowed to roam the stacks at the Troy Public Library, where I read an exotic mix of novels and short stories
-Jo March in Little Women was the first of many literary characters who fed my secret desire to become an author
-We all read Superman comics, but what I remember best are the Great Illustrated Classics that I devoured in my grandfather’s little grocery store
-Your Killraven reminds me of my son’s boyhood favorite, He-Man
dianes last blog post..Hard Questions for Tough Times
diane
1 Aug 08 at 9:26 am
‘but if I want to make them lifelong readers who read like we adults do—we read books and discuss them with others—I’ll allow authentic book chats in class.’
Your conclusion reminds me of the power of the literature circle. Groups of five students agree to read the same novel over a period of time and they take on different roles: discussion director, wordsmith, character profiler, conflict dissector, etc.
I’ve seen some dynamic discussions; they’re simply not following a lame outline provided by the teacher.
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Paul C
1 Aug 08 at 10:24 am
Hi Clay -
I completely agree with you about the power of book choice for students. As a seventh grade teacher I turned over 10% of my class time to free reading. Every other Monday was a reading day, alternated with a free writing Monday. I read lots of wonderful books that my students recommended to me. I read during that time, too. [A real gift on a Monday - read whatever you want!]
I was not sure if the students got as much out of it as I did until this year. Last year I moved to the upper school to teach juniors and seniors, and it was at the beginning of this year that a former student of mine from the seventh grade, Zac, told me that free reading had changed his mind about books. Up until then he hated reading, but we spent hours looking for titles that might tickle his reading fancy. We found it: Master and Commander by O’Brien. Zac spent this summer at Oxford studying Shakespeare.
He tells me that his literature class is always his favorite class now, and when he had mono at the beginning of the year and he was too tired to do anything (he’s a soccer player of some talent) what he chose to do was read. He’s the student that altered me to the South Park episode that riffed on the Grapes of Wrath.
I didn’t “teach” him anything in this except that there is a book for everyone.
Kate Tabors last blog post..Reading, today
Kate Tabor
3 Aug 08 at 1:05 pm
Oh, and… that’s alerting me (not altering me)
We did some really interesting work this year in American Literature around the rise of the American superhero (analyzing, reading, creating) and Michael Chabon’s Kavalier and Clay (and his Escapist character). It was a great way to end May.
Kate Tabors last blog post..Reading, today
Kate Tabor
3 Aug 08 at 1:15 pm
Your page is now on StumbleUpon!
28 Aug 08 at 12:39 am