Four Color Teaching – Creating Superheroes

I cherish the youth writing conference because middle school students are of the perfect mindset for comic book creation (and I mean that with no disrespect whatsoever). They’ve read a few books, but not so many that they understand the formula of story just yet; and with that, they are able to create the most bizarre, beautiful things. It’s like a room full of little raw versions of Fletcher Hanks and Jack Kirby.

So, imagine my surprise when (for the first time in the 5 years that I’ve done this conference) students would stop me, hold up their superhero, and ask, “Is this right?” In the past, this question was framed as “What do you think of this?” and there is a very big difference between the two.

“Is this right?” implies that there is an answer to character creation. That there is a certain template that people must follow and if it is not strictly adhered to, then it must be wrong. And now, more than ever it seems, if students are wrong, then there are some dire consequences. If enough students are wrong on a standardized test, then a school loses funding. When schools lose funding, people lose jobs, kids are sent to other schools where they will be tested again to see if they will fail. Teachers feel pressure from administration, from the media, from politicians to get the best results they can from their students and then those students feel that weight as well.

And so, high-stakes testing has even transformed superhero creation into a dichotomy of “right and wrong.”

I miss the question “what do you think of this?” because it is a question of acceptance. It implies that the creator has built something that they aren’t sure of and they would like validation or input on how to improve this creation. I tend to embrace the absurd, so the stranger the creation, the better. Furthermore, the more bizarre characters allow me to question the student’s decisions and allow them to process their craft.

My favorite moment this time was when a 7th grader explained that her superhero gained powers “after getting hit by a car.” I asked how that could be, and she thought for a very brief moment and then quickly popped off an answer about a magic serum made by an evil doctor. The look of realization on her face made my day. She had a half-formed idea, I posed a question to her, and she made the connection on her own to create a bizarre, wonderful superhero.

Unfortunately, high-stakes testing creates the perception that there is no time for such writing tasks in the classroom. After all, the End of Course Exams writing prompt will be something vanilla like “explain what sports you like” or “write about a time you were proud of your actions” so students have to practice their generic responses to these prompts, right?

Of course not! Just because the test has been designed to be generic doesn’t mean that we have to teach to generic! We should foster creativity and encourage students to run wild with their imaginations rather than dilute our classrooms with all-purpose writing prompts.

The media likes to present the Common Core Standards as being an Orwellian nightmare, but the English standards basically “can they read and write?” The writing standards boil down to having students write descriptively, informatively, and persuasively. Somewhere along the way, there has been a disconnect between good writing that improves student skills and creative writing that allows for the imagination to run wild.

Comics aren’t only the answer for this, but they are a great start. Students who connect their hero to other forms of heroes are learning to look behind the curtain of fiction writing. By understanding the hero formula through their own creation, they can better evaluate the heroes that occur in other pieces of fiction. And it should be the goal of education to make students become more reflective of the media they are exposed to.

It can all begin with an understanding of superheroes.