Blog #6 – Vocab in Comics, Music as Artifact, and More.
Blog #6 – Vocab in Comics, Music as Artifact, and more
Hi and welcome to the first week of August! I go back to school in a few weeks and can’t wait to meet my new students. Teaching is weird that way – you spend the entire year setting up a family and getting through major educational milestones… just to start all over again the next year. It’s the best and worst thing about teaching – always nice though to get a new start and new chances to make a difference. I figure I have directly impacted about 3,570 students over the past 25 years, plus more as a club advisor, mentor, homeroom teacher, lunchroom monitor, etc. Really humbling when you think about the impact we have as teachers. I hope you all are enjoying your summer – I know I am. It’s that part of the summer where I don’t even know what day of the week it is and I love the mental and emotional break. The ability to be there fully for my wife and three kids. BUT - it’s time to start stretching my teacher muscles and faces….
If you read this before August 8th (my birthday), head on over to my Teaching with Comics Facebook page as I am giving away an awesome set of comics to celebrate my birthday.
I watched the Odyssey last week and mostly loved it. I am headed to see Spider-Man tomorrow with my kids. I love all the ways we can do text to text comparisons and make connections between movies, pop culture, comics, prose, etc. I know my students will be talking about these movies, so I will find ways to bring them into my classroom. You can also see Blog Post #5, where I wrote specifically about the Odyssey and connections to the classroom. Post here - https://www.historycomics.net/timsmythblog
I also have to update the blog as I just came across two comics that connect to the Odyssey – the 1953 Classics Illustrated: The Odyssey. (I found a copy really low priced on eBay). Wow – loved it. I know we can read comics digitally, but there is nothing like the smell and feel of an older comic! Hard to believe that it is over 70 years old! I showed it to my daughter as it includes the joke from Homer that the recent movie left out – the one about being “No Man.” I also read and enjoyed DC Superhero Girls: Hit and Myths by Shea Fontana and Yancey Labat (ISBN 9781401267612). The heroes are studying The Odyssey in school, and it has an impact on their real-life adventures. For younger readers – it’s a great way to introduce classic literature to young readers.
Let’s talk about comics as literature/real reading. The academic research on this topic continues to grow, with one stating that 52 rare words appear for every thousand words in adult prose novels. However, in comics, they appear 53 times per 1,000. (Haynes and Athens). This has a lot to do with the built-in scaffolding in comics between text and image and also the limited amount of space for words. Comics build deep and meaningful vocabulary, and I personally know this to be true from my own three kids. To prove the power of comics here, Jarrett Lerner uses the same study and brilliantly puts it all together in just one “simple” image. You can see the image below, but I implore you to visit his website for so much awesomeness on comics and story-telling - https://jarrettlerner.com/ . Truly - Jarrett’s books are favorties in my house and he is such an awesome human being. He is so kind to share so much free activities on his website that will get kids writing and drawing - he uses imagination to encourage storytelling.
One of my all-time favorite comics is the Marvel Infinity Gauntlet from 1991. The comics have been reprinted and available in book form for about $23. Don’t tell my son, but this original version is so much better than the movies. The reason why Thanos seeks to kill so many beings is that he is in love with Lady Death and wants to impress her. The story here is just so mind-boggling and makes the reader really struggle with what “evil” really means. I went back and reread it recently and here are just some of the literacy vocabulary that I was able to pull out of it. These are the words I was learning as a teenager by reading “just” a comic! As Stan Lee said, ““I determined to never talk down to the reader. I insisted on using college-level vocabulary. If a kid didn’t know what a word meant, he’d get it by the use in the sentence by osmosis. If he had to go to a dictionary, that’s not the worst thing in the world!” It’s also a great way to say to your students who love a movie, show, or video game, that they should go back and read the original story – a great hook for reading!
Music and the history classroom. A few weeks ago, my family and I visited the new Bruce Springsteen Center for American Music at Monmouth University – 382 Cedar Avenue, Long Branch, NJ 07740. My daughter is in college as a History/Museum Studies major and we have always connected through music. I love seeing a museum through her eyes as she seeks to make sure many voices are included in exhibits and that history is engaging and accessible. We absolutely fell in love with this museum and you have to visit if you are in the area. So much music history – not “just” about Springsteen. It’s truly a love letter to American music , of all types, that have had such a profound impact on the world. If you are on LinkedIn, be sure to follow Melissa Kozlowski – the Director of Curatorial Affairs for the museum. She is a true force of nature and her posts about the museum are sublime. Here is a link to two lessons I do with my students on music as historical artifact. Feel free to adapt and use as you will. If you do use it, or visit the museum, please let me know!
Music Lessons - https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SolxBAjtuK4mlhWm8INkoMYuSDj6hOllJGAd4Cr4PuI/edit?usp=sharing
All right – as usual , I have written too much. I am in the midst of trying to write my second book on analytical reading and writing across the curriculum – wish me luck! I am also meeting with people from the National WWII Museum in New Orleans this week. They reached out and asked if I would run programming on art, comics, and WWII – stay tuned for more info. I also have another PBS Newshour article coming out this week – this one is about how to use an amazing comic put together by Andrew Aydin (friend and co-author of John Lewis’ March Trilogy and Run). The comic is Islands in the Sky – 11 stories about those devastatingly impacted by Hurricane Helene – keep an eye out for the article. I’ll share more in my next blog – it’s a must read. You can read an excerpt here - https://www.salvationsouth.com/islands-sky-comic-excerpt/ and you can buy the entire comic here - https://appalachia-comics.myshopify.com/ . This comic takes primary source accounts and makes us all responsible for what is happening to our fellow man - so powerful.
OH – WAIT – I am also in the process of setting up an LLC for Teaching with Comics and also setting up a nonprofit to help me raise funds/donations as I do a lot of free literacy events and book giveaways for deserving kids! Wish me luck in this process! Alright – next blog – representation/cultural humility in comics, ideas for us introverts on the first week of school, Batman and Batwoman videos as artifacts, Wordless Comics, and more. Please share my blog with others as I am avoiding using Substack and other services that are a bit problematic. Please also make sure to sign up for the blog as I will, as some point, make my posts private for only subscribers – but still for free! PLEASE leave me a comment and tell me what you like or what you’d like me to write about next.
Once again, I am the Eisner nominated author of Teaching with Comcis and Graphic Novels and my website is teachingwithcomics.com. Let me know if you’d like to have me out to a conference, school/university, musuem, etc. - my email is historycomicsguy@gmail.com
So… last thing – as always, a favorite cover from my comic book collection. This week, I don’t have to write anything about it – just have to show the comic. This issue is from 1985, and the cover alone wrecked me. Truly a powerful example of comics and their ability to emotionally involve the reader! This would also be a great writing prompt – what happened? What do you notice about the characters in the background? This could be a simply Do Now as students enter – 15 minutes of flash fiction!