Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Graphic Novels
I recently read The Complete Persepolis and was amazed at how it held my attention. At first, I was dreading this long, comic book type read. It's going to be difficult, confusing, or just plain boring. Comic books were never really my type of literature to read. This graphic novel was actually hard to put down. I wanted to know what was going to happen next as if reading any other novel. Cool! It's definitely a new experience trying to read the text and look at all the artwork. It took more time to read through than just text. This type of novel might help those students who are visual learners. The pictures give clues to feelings and thoughts of the characters that some might not pick up on with text alone. Before reading, I thought this type of novel wouldn't be part of my curriculum. Now, I think it's a nice change from the text-only novels. I'm curious to know how many English teachers use graphic novels because this was the first time I've encountered one.
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I definitely liked Persepolis better than Naruto.
ReplyDeleteI agree. Persepolis has much more merit in the classroom.Unfortunately, Naruto is what the kids are reading. I also think that taking a chance on a graphic novel would be cool because your students would see how innovative you can be. They need to know that English isn't just hard to read boring stuff (in their opinion, not mine!). Visual learners might feel like there is some hope for them to read and might really get into it. Who knows, they could be the next famous graphic artist and we would have started it all!
ReplyDeleteI agree as well. At first I really did not want to read Persepolis because I thought it would be long and not interesting. After the first few pages though, I was hooked! It turned out to be a deep memoir about the life of a woman in Iran. I never knew anything about this subject before, so it was extremely interesting to me. I hope they make this text the required reading for Kent State freshmen next year. (I believe Dr. Kist said that the might).
ReplyDeletePersepolis was definitely one of those works where you looked at the cover and thought hmm...maybe not. But after reading it I would have to agree with all of you that it truly was a great memoir. I know that I plan on teaching graphic novels in my classroom and I think that Persepolis would be a great work to teach as it touches so many content areas ex. history, geography.
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