Thursday, January 8, 2009

I Wonder


I created this quick one page comic and made copies to handout at a teacher inservice I was presenting a while back. It was our first activity -- an icebreaker. My goal was to get teachers thinking about how it can be so easy to want to just approach our classes with an objective and try to yank them out of where there thoughts currently are. Even teachers sometimes have their minds on other things! Are there some times when we can make good use of what our students are obsessing about as a writing or drawing prompt?

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I wonder if Mr. Wales will understand when I tell him he's looking good for a man of 44.
Happy b-day!
Brian

Ben Villarreal said...

Hey Andy,
A grad student and I are representing our English Department at a local literacy fair this weekend. Our overt goal is to get middle and high school students excited about college English. My covert goal (since I teach comics) is to hook some other teachers onto the idea of using comics in the classroom. I wanted to ask if you minded me displaying (or even handing out) this or some of your other Curriculum Comics at our booth. I understand if you would rather I didn't, so no worries.

Unknown said...

Yes, please do. Anything you like.

Ben Villarreal said...

Thanks Andy! I'm not entirely sure what (if anything) I'll use, because I'm not meeting with the grad student to plot out our display until tomorrow. Plus the Composition Director wants us to mainly showcase the subjects we teach in our writing class. So I'll be sharing the space with books and readings on food--that's the subject of the grad student's course! That's right! Scott McCloud will find himself propped up against Paula Dean :-)
But I wanted to make sure Andy Wales didn't have a problem being tossed into the mix!