If I had been able to read graphic novels in school, maybe I would have been more academically successful. I always loved reading until I had to start reading chapter books in school. One year, in grade school, each kid would get a sticker for each book they finished. At the end of that year, my friends and other classmates had at least around 8-10 stickers, which made me feel bad because I only had 3 stickers. Once I started having to read chapter books, reading became very boring, and hard, and seemed to take forever. I didn’t know why I wasn’t as efficient at reading as my classmates. All I knew is that I was much slower, and I eventually hated and even dreaded reading.
In high school, I started seeing a tutor specifically to help me with reading since that was one of my main struggles academically. She was the first person to notice that my OCD was particularly prominent in my reading. I would re-read words and sentences as many times as I needed to in order to feel like I knew the information. I would always hear other people say that they would read a paragraph and not remember what they had just read, so they would re-read it. To me, this made me feel like my habits were normal. The difference was that I did know the information I had just read, but I felt like I had to read it multiple times out of fear of missing information. It became such an issue for me that I would quickly fall behind in school. I had to work with my tutor multiple times a week to fight this compulsion. The best way I can describe it is like resisting scratching an itch that you can’t help but notice.
Obsessive compulsions weren’t my only struggles when it came to reading. I have heard friends and family members talk about imagining what different characters and scenes in a book look like in their own mind. They liked creating a world in their head that corresponded to whatever book they were reading. This has never been the case for me. Once reading chapter books became a requirement in school, I really struggled to visualize what was happening in whatever book or story I was reading. Picture books would already give you an illustration of what to visualize while reading, but chapter books leave it up to the reader. Some people love this, but for me it stresses me out, even the most specific descriptions of scenes and characters are still too vague for me to grasp an image in my head. Not being able to imagine what a story looks like in my head, makes it much harder to understand what is actually happening in the story.
In my junior year of high school, my English teacher could tell how far behind I was in reading, and just how much I was struggling. She would make copies of graphic novel versions of the books that we had to read. I really started to enjoy reading again. Having pictures that go along with the words in a story takes away the stress and frustration of visualizing what the words were saying, which made the story and reading much more fluent. It also helped a lot to have pictures to turn to when my OCD would come up. It would give me enough of a break to redirect my thinking, while still being engaged with the story. I went from struggling to read one book in a year, to reading one book a month, and reading for fun.
It frustrates me that many schools will not let their students read graphic novels, when they may be more helpful to some people. There are graphic novel versions of almost every classic story from The Odyssey to The Great Gatsby. Having the graphic novel version of classic stories for kids in school could help kids stay more engaged with the content they are studying. The stories in graphic novels are still as thorough as any other story and include exceptional vocabulary as well. Even comics have a lot to offer in the way of studying literature. The stories are set up just like any other story, if anything they are more complex than classic stories. Many comics outline stories of gods, goddesses, and wars. Many times, I find myself having to look up the vocabulary I see in comic books. Comic books don’t skimp out on vocabulary. My point is that graphic novels and comic books are what keep some people drawn to, and excited about, reading. They are not ‘childish’ by any means. Reading is a tool to learn. We all learn differently. Some people are kinesthetic, visual, or auditory learners. It only makes sense to have more tools that correspond with different styles of learning. If there are different ways of learning, why can’t there be different ways of teaching.
-KAM
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