Comic books! The laziest teaching.

 

This was my bookstore haul today! All but one is a comic book, which is something I'd never have imagined happening 10 years ago.

I was not one of those kids, the kids who loved comic books. My parents had a library full of old books, so I grew up on a steady diet of 19th century ladies' novels. (Wonderfully big R Romantic by the way. I particularly loved the nature crones of Gene Stratton Porter.)

SO when I began with my two boys, I was very snobby about comic books. They read early, they read often, so why bother with "books" meant for boys who hated reading? I made some concessions; Calvin & Hobbes is genuinely witty, the vocabulary interesting, and the themes occasionally philosophical. 

And, I believed fully in the Classical education idea of learning through text. And I still believe that textual learning is a critical skill. And if I was fully homeschooling, I would still be emphasizing text. 

But! My kids are learning through text at school. They are getting that skill. 

So the turning point came when I was teaching my son ancient history and noticed that the time spent on ancient China was.. less thorough than I'd have liked. The further we got through history, the more it bothered me. And the problem was, how could I possibly teach my kid the breadth of Chinese history in any sort of satisfactory way? 

That's when I came across Jing Liu's Foundations of Chinese Civilization series, a four volume comic book history of China that covers empires, philosophy, arts, humanities, etc. And as I read it, it occurred to me that a lot of it was structured like a really good infographic. Things that would tricky to understand in text seemed very obvious in bulleted lists, maps, graphs, etc. And my kid loved it. He demanded I immediately get the second volume, and he read each volume, backwards and forwards. 

This works great with the "spine" history model. We use an overarching history series to get the breadth of history, but we use activities and other books to dig into individual topics, to give depth. When I began, I tried to align the my kids' extra reading to the spine (so they'd be read together). We still use the Cartoon History of the Universe in alignment with our spine (Story of the World), but I simply make sure to have extra books on the topic on my shelves and trust for the most part that they will be read. Whether they read it at the same time, or later, I've decided it doesn't matter, since the alternative is that they read it when they're interested.

So, I now keep a running order from my book vendor full of comic books. We have comprehensive histories like the Larry Gonick Cartoon History of the Universe series. We have plenty of histories of people who often get left out, like Still I Rise (History of African-Americans) and Jews In America. We have alternative histories, like Hark! A Vagrant! We've learned about samurai and logic and Malcolm X. We've learned about evolution and philosophy and economics. We've read stories by African American authors, tales from India and Iran, and Shakespeare, as you see. 

For the most part, I do not tell my kids to read these. I just put them on the shelf. Eventually, they read them. L__, the older, will read anything in comic book form, if it's in the humanities. A___, the younger, loves the science-based comics (he's a fan of the Max Axiom series) and the myths and stories, but less the other humanities. So I do occasionally read them with my kids if it's something we're studying. Last year, it was evolution that required a more formal approach. But I'd say 90 percent of these are books that just get read without any intervention from me. 

One quick caveat: be wary of Christian publishers. You never know when you're going to get boosterism around Jamestown or a 6000-year-old world. Generally I overlook mistakes in comic books (try finding an accurate book on Native Americans!), because we read so much and most of the worst of these will be counteracted by other information read elsewhere. But the Christian publishers tend to be worse than average, and it can be insidious.

(A periodic lecture about hagiography is a good idea even with more formal history texts. I probably give some version of that lecture on the order of every six months.)

That said, using comic books to "teach" without really having to teach is a delight. I still find it important to teach formally, but using things like comic books (and other materials I'll get to later) helps reinforce and deepen their knowledge, without it being a burden on the teacher or the student.