Different Modes of Writing: Maus, Unflattering, and My Last Tutoring Session
My Last Tutoring Session
Last
Wednesday was my last time tutoring at the local high school, as I will no
longer have time as of next semester to continue tutoring students there. For
the past 3 semesters, I have tutored a first generation immigrant to the United
States, who is in third grade. I’ll call her Mi. Although I tutored her in
English, she didn’t actually struggle with the subject. We worked through three books one
in science, one in writing, and one in grammar. She always understood the
concepts very quickly and we moved through the books rather rapidly. However,
this semester instead of the writing book she just brought in a blank
composition notebook. We worked on writing stories. The first story Mi wrote
was about a girl who discovered a door that took her to an island. The girl
climbed up a tree and was hit by a chicken, which pecked her to death. Like
most children, Mi is very imaginative. The next week Mi had drawn a comic in
one of her other classes and wanted to draw another. I suggested that she adapt
the story that she wrote last week into a comic. After Mi drew the comic, we
analyzed the differences between the two and what she details she had to add in
order to draw the comic. The next week Mi had drawn another comic on her own
and written a poem, so she wrote another poem and started another comic.
Maus: My Foray into the Graphic Novel
While
waiting for her to show up the following week, I found a youtube video* “How to Design a Comics Page,” by Nerdwriter1
through Reddit. It intrigued me, because of Mi. I wanted to learn something I
could pass on to her. In the video, Nerdwriter1 talks about Art Spiegleman’s
graphic novel Maus, which is about
Art’s father’s experiences during the Holocaust. As I watched the video, I was reminded of my
class on teaching adolescents to write, where my professor stressed almost
constantly, that stages, modes, and disciplines of writing should not be kept
separate. For example, he often mentioned that we should still be concerned
with the outline or structure of a paper even as we are revising it. Outlining
and editing shouldn’t be kept separate. Writing instruction is filled with a
bunch of arbitrary divisions: Students shouldn’t worry about voice until they
have a grasp on grammar, students shouldn’t break convention, until they can
write in the standard way, and so on. My professor argued that we should
meaningfully and deliberately break those divisions. To illustrate this, he
brought in Unflattering by Nick
Sousanis, a graphic novel that is also his doctoral dissertation.** Holding the
book in his hand, my professor said approximately,
“This
is proof of what I’ve been telling you guys. You can’t get more academic and
official than this. This is, in some ways, the highest standard of academic
writing, the dissertation and here it is breaking the division between academic
‘official’,” He implied air quotes with his tone, “writing and creative
writing. It’s both.” He passed the book around and it was weird, but definitely
cool to see something that merged genres like that.
Putting Theory into Practice
I
showed Mi the youtube video and she also thought it was cool, though she was
disappointed that the book was in black and white. She would have preferred
color. Despite it’s lack of color, Mi still wanted to imitate Art Spiegleman
and so she made a comic where, like the example page in the video, each panel
made up a larger picture, when the reader looks at the entire page. While she
was making that, I ordered Maus from
the library, because my interest was sufficiently piqued to the point where I
wanted to read this graphic novel.
Typically,
I read classic literature, but recently
I’ve been trying to expand my reading to include other genres like science
fiction, Fahrenheit 451 and 1984, and now
graphic novels, because it was never my intention to only read classics. It
just somehow happened that the majority of books I read are classics. I picked
it up and started reading it. When it came time to go to tutoring I put it in my
backpack to read, while I waited for Mi to show up, because I often get there
early, either that or barely on time there’s no in between for me. For the
first 15 minutes, we just read the graphic novel. It was so cool to be able to
show her fun things and things she’s interested in can be in school too. While
she loves science and she would make an awesome scientist, or anything for that
matter, I don’t want her to think that her other non-STEM related interest, comics,
is less important or less valuable.
I
highly recommend Maus, as well as
Nerdwriter1’s video on it, and I haven’t read Nick Sousanis’ dissertation, but
it looks cool too.
**Article on Boingboing.net on Nick Sousanis' Dissertation (Also wasn’t paid to promote this)
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