goin graphic

I really enjoyed Rice's article about her experiences with starting to use graphic novels in her classroom.  She was shocked by how intensive reading a graphic novel could be and was surprised that it took her an average of 12 hours of further research to fully understand the novel.  After having read a few graphic novels in World Literature, this does not surprise me.  Most of the graphic novels that I have seen and the ones that I would consider teaching in a classroom as a unit of their own have been about different cultures, countries, and time periods which would require a lot of front loading since graphic novels are not very descriptive.  Much of a graphic novel's meaning is left up to the reader's inferrences and ability to read between the lines.  One panel structure is designed to allow the reader to imagine what happens between one panel and the next.  There is a lot of personal interpretation.  Students would definitely have to research on their own or the teacher would have to be fully aware of all the ambiguous scenes in order for the students to understand the graphic novel entirely.

If I decide to teach the graphic novel version of a canonical text, it will be much easier to introduce the novel to my students.  I will most likely be familiar with the content and the meanings and the graphic novel would simply be supplemental.  However, I do not know if I would ever assign a graphic novel version to my students unless they had difficult reading.  With a normal classroom, I would use scenes from the graphic novel to reinforce or bring to life what the students have read in the original text.  With a classroom of slower readers, I would teach the graphic novel and read important scenes from the original text so that my readers would have some exposure to the original language, especially with Shakespeare.

Although I really liked Rice's ideas and her desire to introduce something new and of such great value to her students, I thought some of her ideas were a little over the top.  She had extreme problems with teaching any text that had something remotely inappropriate.  One graphic novel had a monkey peeing on someone and she had to immediately call a friend in China to figure out why the monkey would pee on someone.  For awhile she was not sure if she could teach this to her classroom.  She was also unsure about teaching a graphic novel that included a phonetically altered curse word that even she didn't pick up on until she studied further.  I was very shocked by her censorship in an English classroom.  If anything, my English teacher promoted the banned books and tried to expose us to as much controversy and real world issues and language as possible.  If we were quoting a book and left out or hesitated at something "inappropriate" she would encourage to quote the book word for word no matter what.

I was also surprised by the amount of money she expected to get and the amount of money she actually got during her first year of teaching graphic novels.  Maybe I am a little ignorant of book prices, but $2000 sounds like plenty to begin a new form of teaching and reading.  She seemed put off that she only recieved $2000 the first year and $1500 the second year.  She then spent $600 of her money.  I realize that buying books new and through a school would be more expensive than when I buy books off of amazon, but each book couldnt have been more than $30, in which case she could've bought at least 150 copies of a graphic novel the first year, which seems like an incredible amount to me.  But then I am used to really small highschools in which the class size is usually 116 and classrooms only hold about 20 students.  But I can only hope that I introduce something new the to the classroom and the school I will be able to obtain $2000 because that sounds pretty useful.