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.

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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

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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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.

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@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.

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.

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