Graphic tales make novel teaching tools.

IT TOOK the fear of Death to get Meghan Cromie's year 9 English students excited about reading. Not your average death, mind. No, this was Death personified as a foxy 19-year-old lass with a penchant for top hats and Mary Poppins quotes. Her escapades were sketched, among other places, across the pages of Neil Gaiman's graphic novels. And much like death itself, she left a lasting impression on everyone in the classroom she touched.

This was a relief for Ms Cromie, a senior English teacher at South Australia's Pedare Christian College. Faced with a class of disengaged students who struggled to read traditional texts, she was desperate for material that would excite her charges. So she pitched the graphic novels as "dark, mysterious and underground", told her students they were about to explore uncharted territory and had their attention from the get-go.

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So she's got the kids reading comics.

JK Rowling was criticised by a number of parent groups because her book "Harry Potter" was occult. Many other parents and teachers however were delighted that her books gave children (and adults) the impetus to read. The story was simple to understand and had the elements of all good v evil tales with a simple writing style.

Manga in Japan and from there many other countries in Asia and beyond vary from sophisticated stories to outright hard core porn. They became popular because the language is complex and for many people too difficult to understand, In the west we tend to denigrate Graphic Novels but since the 1900s there have been some incredible artists who have specialised in this medium. Will Eisner, Bob Crumb, and even the artists from Mad magazine have been stalwarts of the art. Dark Horse publications in Colorado were the ones who supported the underground market for novels such as "The Crow". Bob Kane who wrote the original version of Bat Man did it as a very dark style graphic novel that was then dumbed down by DC comics to become the "caped crusader"

Many popular graphic novels such as hel_l Boy, Dare Devil and even Spider Man were taken from Graphic novels and converted to the even more dumbed down form of entertainment - Movies.

In my opinion a graphic novel can be a fascinating and educational tool - A picture tells a thousand words - but like other mediums such as Television and Movies, it is how it is presented that is the important point.

CB

I enjoyed the one about the Holocaust with Jewish mice and feline Nazi's by Art Spiegelman .

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maus

Maus

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Maus

Writer(s) Art Spiegelman

Artist(s) Art Spiegelman

Maus: A Survivor's Tale is a memoir by Art Spiegelman, presented as a graphic novel. The graphic novel as a whole took thirteen years to complete. It recounts the struggle of Spiegelman's father to survive the Holocaust as a Polish Jew and draws largely on his father's recollections of his experiences. The book also follows the author's troubled relationship with his father and the way the effects of war reverberate through generations of a family. In 1992, it won a Pulitzer Prize Special Award. All people are presented as anthropomorphic animals (for example, all Jews are depicted as mice, hence the name Maus which is German for "mouse"). The New York Times described the selection of Maus for the honor: "The Pulitzer board members ... found the cartoonist's depiction of Nazi Germany hard to classify."[1]

I must admit I've never seen them.

Remember the old Classics Illustrated? I must confess I learned the plots of many "great" novels that I would never have bothered reading. (They're worth a fortune now). They still weren't allowed at school though.

My "dumbing down" crack referred to the "everybody must pass" attitude in modern education.

Sure, bring comics into the classroom so the slower kids can read, but to me it means that the smart kids get left behind.

Excellence isn't achieved by doing things the easy way, it's attained by hard work and doing things that are hard.

My favorite book as a child and the only one i think i ever actually fully read was Charly and the chocolate factory..... i used to hate reading Shakespeare !!!! .... only passed my english exams because me mum bought me the video pf the book

I had a stack of books when I was a kid. Arthur Mee's encyclopedias, (how the hel_l did I ever end up a leftist?), Just William, Biggles, Treasure Island, the Bobbsy Twins (God help me), Lion Annuals... No TV in those days, every night I had my nose in a book.

Yes, it's a dumbing down situation. The teachers will tell you it's because the kids aren't as bright or attentive as they once were. the fact is, the teachers and those organizations they belong to refuse to accept the responsibility of their profession. Additioally, there is an awful lot of really bad parenting out there. Both parents and teachers want to be "friends" with the child, rather than mentors.

I would guess that I averaged finishing a book a day as long as I was in school and long after.

I read whatever appealed to me from classics to mythology and fairy tales to adventure, military non-fiction, history and science fiction as well as about any subject that caught my attention on TV or in magazines or whatever the teachers asked me to read.

I watched plenty of TV and movies and read a bunch of comic books and still can't understand the people who act like you can't enjoy them all.

I hated reading Shakespeare then and I hate reading him now. Why read something written in archaic language that you almost need a translator for?

In my opinion, Shakespeare should mostly be thought of as poetry and enjoyed for the rhythm of the language, rather than for the story.

Nowadays, if I want to learn something more about philosophy or psychology or subjects that I am not that keen on, I will pick up one of those College textbooks where they "Introduce" important topics and historical figures in comic book form. They are often not very easy to understand, but the pictures help explain the concepts in print.

If you think they are for children, just try giving "Introducing the Chaos Theory" a whirl!

This is all new to me general, I wasn't encouraged to read comics as a kid but I still loved them.

My Granny used to send me a bundle of English weekly comics every couple of months but these were OK according to my father who I sometimes caught reading the war stories in them.

He was against the Disney comics... I loved the Uncle Scrooge stories!!! Superman etc so I suppose that carried on. So I have a problem seeing comics as educational tools.

lannarebirth!!!! These teachers and those organizations they belong to???

You're not talking about unions are you? Oh no, not the teachers, anyonebut the teachers... no wonder World Communism is on the rise... hang on, no... it's Islam isn't it, sorry, it's hard to keep up these days.

Uncle Scrooge were some of my favorite comics.

Next time you visit my store, ask someone one to see "Introducing" Chomsky, Nietzche, Chaos Theory, Jung, Foucault, Karl Marx, Einstien, Stephen Hawking, Quantam Physics, Darwin, etc.. I found a whole bunch of them.

They are all comics used for college classrooms and quite educational.

I was quite a book-worm as a kid, still am, just a bit more discerning now.

I feel the need to defend Shakespeare here a little. Personally i adore Shakespeare, and was grateful when my English teacher at High School introduced our class to his works. The subtleties and the skill of his words, where often one sentence can contain so many clever meanings, would not be the same (imo) if translated in modern English. His insults especially are very skillfully done.

But anyway, with regards to the use of a graphic novel in the classroom, i think anything that gets kids reading is good. Im not sure what age group year 11 is, but glad if it gets them interested and fuels them into discussion etc. If I were the teacher, i would also see it as a stepping stone in introducing them to more 'complex' reading material. Maybe it calls for a new genre of school reading material (rather than Jane threw the red ball for Tody style boring crappola I was subjected to in my primary years).

I feel the need to defend Shakespeare here a little. Personally i adore Shakespeare, and was grateful when my English teacher at High School introduced our class to his works. The subtleties and the skill of his words, where often one sentence can contain so many clever meanings, would not be the same (imo) if translated in modern English. His insults especially are very skillfully done.

I guess that I should have said that Shakespeare is for girls!

I feel the need to defend Shakespeare here a little. Personally i adore Shakespeare, and was grateful when my English teacher at High School introduced our class to his works. The subtleties and the skill of his words, where often one sentence can contain so many clever meanings, would not be the same (imo) if translated in modern English. His insults especially are very skillfully done.

I guess that I should have said that Shakespeare is for girls!

How very dare you! Shakespare rocks! Of all his work I could probably count on one hand what I don't like. I can't say that of many writers.