Dignified Reading

In the comments to this post, Stevie T mentions that Maryland schools have started a test program using comics as teaching tools. The very next morning, NPR's Morning Edition featured that same story. Click here to hear it yourself. The report had pretty much everything you'd expect--teachers defending their use of comics as tools to get kids interested in reading, parents complaining that comics are wasting their kids' time, students coming down on both sides of the issue by enjoying the comics but still wishing they could play video games instead. My favorite moment came from the mother who wondered why, instead of comics, the kids weren't reading Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn. Setting aside the fact that Twain's novel has run into its own problems as part of a school curriculum, the main reason these kids aren't reading it now is that they're not reading much of anything! Teachers turn to comics to get their students reading at all. With their pictures, comics can be less imposing than other textbooks. But they still have words on paper, and if young students begin to enjoy reading these words, they may go on to read more words in other places. If they don't discover the joy of reading, whether it's through comics or through encyclopedias, they'll never move on to Huckleberry Finn under any circumstances.

Apparently the schools are using a number of comics titles, but the one featured in the report was Jim Ottaviani's Dignifying Science, a collection of biographies of female scientists with art by a variety of comics artists. Schools could do much worse than reading Ottaviani's work. Not only are the comics interesting and enjoyable, they're informative and educational, too.