digg

Which is funny, because those were my father's comic books. Classics Illustrated!
Very cool article! Thanks! Expect to see a post from me on this subject soon.

I think I remember Classics Illustrated.

Dugg for encouraging reading by any means possible.

Whatever happened to phonics?

Here are some funny comics, but I doubt anyone will learn anything from them:
http://www.bofads.com/stories/comics.htm

Great article. My class on Beowulf is currently studying Gareth Hinds' graphic novel of the poem, and it's nice to see the medium being studied elsewhere.

Awesome

I would like teaching like that

"No mom, I checked out Jenna Jameson's Shadow Hunter for the story, not the pictures!"

let the marvel and shakespeare crossover begin!

I am glad to see this is a trend... We had to read the Communist Manifesto for one of my university classes and my professor told us just to read the comic book version... It was same information but much easier to understand...

when i was in first grade (1982) my mom had a conference with my teacher because she was concerned that i was reading nothing but comics and mad magazine. the teacher told her that considering the teen reading and comprehension level that both required, that she should be happy that i had advanced that far so early. there is no excuse for illiteracy today. if it takes comics for children to be interested then so be it. that just means supporting the artists who illustrate for a living and that rocks.

In middle school (4 years ago) the librarian at my school had two full bookshelves full of graphic novels. I think he had just about all the Dragonball and Dragonball Z ones, along with a few other series. Kids ate those up.

When I was back in high school we had to do a report for English 12, Everyone was going through their own ways and my partner and myself decided to do a little comic type presentation for class. We searched the internet and found a comic by Garth Hinds, and we were originally going to use it as inspiration but after seeing screenshots of the comic we decided to order a copy. The comic was amazing and when we were actually done with the comic I gave it to our English teacher as a birthday present for her.

http://www.amazon.com/Collected-Beowulf-Gareth-Hin ...

I used comics in my elementary classroom. The students were taught the narrative structure of problem/solution in a few frames. They then had to create their own comics. It was a lot of fun and very motivational. They traded the comics they made and had to read other students'.

Great, a photo of the teacher holding comic books. And then what? That article was too long for my attention span.

They should have done the article in comic book form. That would have been cool.

In college I had to write two papers on the Maus 1 & 2 books by Art Spiegelman. Those were great.

Old news, was on AnimeNewsNetwork over a month ago.

1. Dumb down the American public until their attention span approaches that of gnat.
2. Destroy democracy on behalf of the corporations and banks and engage in endless war while the people are too dumbed down to notice.
3. Profit (for a chosen few).

BTW U.S. citizen here. What's to be done? Volunteer to teach people to read (gasp) books of literature, science and math (without pictures). Support your local library. Fully fund our schools and pay teachers a competitive wage. Tell Libertarians that the real world doesn't work like their tidy little economic models, Katrina ring a bell>

@ MRRAVEN
I learned how to read with comics. I was dyslexic and couldn't read for ***** when I was 12, then I started going to the comic book store every day after school and spending my parents money (a lot of money) and by the time I was in 8th grade I was at a College reading level. One of the first "real" books I ever read was Parallel Universes by Fred Allan Wolf, and that was followed by A Brief History of Time by Hawkings and since then I've read all the major American writers of the last 100 years. So don't knock comics. They are fun. Great writing. Great art.

It's a good idea for those who don't want to read, but I wonder if it's limiting at all to ones creativity. The allure of a novel is that you imagine all the images in your own way, wheras a comic lays them out for you. Both ways are fine if you're just learning to read, but I can't help but wonder.

Also, Dash is the most awesome name for a kid I've heard recently.

Teachers should use digg to encourage reading :P

My sophomore English teacher gave us Persepolis and we had to write a thesis on it :)

Batman meets Crime and Punishment = instant classic

http://againwiththecomics.blogspot.com/2007/08/bat ...

Anyone else notice how terrible the cover was right away?

A very excellent idea! I wonder if this could somehow be applied to math and science curriculum?

Cartoon History of the Universe, v 1-4 - absolute must reads
Cartoon Guide to Statistics is another great one
Seriously - check them out.

"Maus" captivated me as a 7th grader. I am now 29, and to this day, I have been interested in the history of WWII and the Holocaust. This is inspiring me to read them again.

As a past high school English teacher, I have sort of a love/hate opinion of this. I hate that we've come to this point to get kids to read. I agree with stythe that this may limit the creativity of imagining the world you read about. On the other hand, it'd be nice to hand out a class set of Hamlet to a few less groans! If this is what it takes to get kids reading, then more power to them!

I think comics have a big place in the classroom, because they use more visuals and can in some ways be used to encourage creativity in kids. If anybody's interested I made a page on how to use comics with English learners in a creative way, please feel free to look at this page:
http://www.jamesabela.co.uk/intermediate/comics.ht ...

Awesome idea. I am not ashamed to say I learnt to read through Commando Comics. This is probably why I knew quite a lot of both German and English before I even attended school.

I'm amazed they're using the Canterbury Tales. I remember seeing the movie version of that, which at the time was X rated but now would probably be a hard R, and I'm surprised that they'd have that in a public school. Although the part with the devils farting out priests was amusing.

Classics Illustrated was an excellent launching point for many young readers to explore the full-length novels on which the comics are based. They accomplished something that many teachers and parents fail to achieve despite threats and punishments. Early readers read without imagination. Truly. That's why there are so many pictures in children's books. Imagination and the ability to visualize a scene from the written word is something that is an acquired talent. It can take off quickly in some, but never come to fruition in others, even through adulthood.

Once the children can see that there is something behind the dense blocks of words (without pictures), and they have a mind's eye picture of it, growing to read other books become easier with every book.

If it weren't for Spider Man and a teacher who was willing to let my son read what we could get him to read, he'd probably now be the oldest 5th grader in NY State.

Before, I could read. We were interested in comics. My older sister would read them and then we would act out the scenes. It was before Sponge Bob. What can I say.

That's wonderful. Any way you can get a kid to read, great! Now let's hope they will use something like this to teach the proper use of they're, their, there, lose, loose, etc.