Much To Do About Everything

Which would you pick, the ability to do everything, or the ability to do a few things, or maybe one thing?

I think the clear answer is everything! Life's too short, I'd love to be able to learn every language, travel the world, experience everything! I can't decide what I want to do, there's too much going on and too little time. So that's why little seven-year-old Jack decided that he couldn't decide what superpower he'd give his brand new superhero for his comic book, Ultra Boy.

The premise followed a boy named Jake (phew, that was close Jack, everyone almost guessed that that's supposed to be you) who got into some freak accident that gave him every superpower. The sequel comic introduced his female counterpart, Ultra Girl. Her name was Julia (coincidentally and not at all related, I had a crush on my neighbor with the same name) and she had every superpower as well. They teamed up and fought Dr. Evil (any correlation to Austin Powers was purely coincidental and due to the limited mind of a seven-year-old boy), a fight that they struggled with, but still came out on top. This comic was a limited run, only having two issues in the fall of 2010, so obviously it's a collectors item now.

To get a little bit personal, my grandma passed away that following January. She stayed with us sometimes due to her poor health, but I remember running downstairs after stapling together my comic book to excitedly show her first. She finished reading and said, "Where's the sequel?" I quickly got to work on the second one, and after learning about She-Hulk and Spider-Woman from my big book of Marvel characters I often scoured through, I decided Ultra Boy needed a counterpart. I think the next week I finished it, and immediately showed her again. I unfortunately don't remember what she said specifically, but I do remember her being proud of me, and always encouraging me to be creative. This is all to say when I came up with an idea as an adult for a passion project of a comic book series following superheroes, of course I couldn't decide what superpower I wanted to give the main character.

I've shied away from "traditional" writing formats in my personal writing, but the main one I come back to is comic books. I love the medium, it's so many things I love about storytelling rolled into one. I love the visual aspects, the dialogue, narration, writing style, everything. When I was in early grade school, I thought it was stupid I couldn't read comic books for Accelerated Reader or that it would even count towards reading goals. There was always this elitism towards the classics, and I despised that. I think when I'm a teacher, if a kid wants to read graphic novels or comics for a class, I'll find a way to make that work. Say you're just like me, I think you would have taken to English way earlier if you were able to explore more multimodal genres and studies. I want to create an assignment where, if they wanted, instead of writing an essay they could write a short film, or create a comic book, because I know that's what would have gotten my brain really really thinking. 

In one of our course readings, there's this one article by Jessi Thomsen that perfectly exemplifies this, where there was this summer course with ninth and tenth graders who all were given a collage assignment, and in the article there's a situation that ends up as follows: "She wanted to create a sense of guilt, frustration, and confusion because, as she explained, these feelings still surface in response to a memory of powerlessness while witnessing an act of violence. Leah’s emotions came through the images of her composition, conscientiously and thoughtfully," (Thomsen, p. 5). The biggest thing I think to take away is you could say the same thing if they were making writing. And, in a way, they were making writing, they were organizing their thoughts and emotions onto a page to represent their feelings. I think the current definition of writing in schooling is incredibly limiting, we took away the literal ruler smacking the back of kids hands but we kept the figurative one. There's this kind of elitism when it comes to English studies that really limits what can be taught and said that's really detrimental to the education of writing and media studies as a whole, and while yeah, we study the "old texts" because they've been around long enough for a reason, don't you think it's time to mix things up a bit? Clearly typical English studies aren't working... 

Students can explore so much more when it's not just writing an essay about The Odyssey, because they have so much more creative freedom to do whatever they want. They can turn their ideas about that text into some kind of exploration of social justice and not just write a simple interpretation, poetry is a powerful medium to do so as well. The bottom line is that students need to be able to fully explore their work, how it connects to the world, and what works best for them, because would it be so bad if they liked what they created?