Evidence: The true effects of war on children

Wednesday fortunately deserves little attention. My quiet talented comics class was unfortunately cancelled, leaving only my Photo Comics class. Normally this is a fantastic class, but the centre was making a huge racket by together flags and posters for some anniversary. This made the class almost impossible to teach. Nevertheless, the students did quite, experimenting with telling the story with the photos in front of the class, using props, and then Elena and I offering our thoughts. As frustrating a day as it was, it nonetheless highlights the changeable nature of events in Palestine. This is a teaching impediment for the most part, but helps to explain the somewhat chaotic nature of the education students receive, hardly surprising given how little control they often have of their own lives. As a teacher here, you really need to take fluctuating attendance, cancelled classes and outside distractions as a given, and plan accordingly.
Thursday was an exceptionally sucessful day. With the young comics students, I focused on teaching picture book style stories. I draw a distinction between comics and picture books. With picture books, a story is told through prose words, and is for the most part completely comprehensible were the story to be told without the pictures at all. The pictures serve to enhance the theme or tone of the story, as well as provide visual clues to the comprehension of the written text. Comics, by contrast, require the juxtaposition of words and images for comprehension. The tone of a person's voice or the setting of a scene is usually communicated entirely visually, with the only text being dialogue or occasional narration. It's a somewhat subtle distinction without examples in front of you, but in terms of how a story is told it makes a world of difference.

The lesson began with me reading a passage from Neil Gaiman's The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish. I explained how the story can be understood entirely with words, and that the pictures just help. I then had the students write a four sentence story, entiteled "My Dad Goes to Work."

Most of the stories were pretty simple - Dad wakes up, dad eats, dad goes to work, dad comes home from work. I then had the students show me what they planned to draw, and then they drew it up on four full pages, with the text at the top. I also gave some suggestions - many drew near identical panels for dad going to and coming home from work, so I suggested some varriation, as well as occasional changes in the shot or encouraging the kids to use more of the whole page.

The exercise went really well, took up the whole class, and produced some excellent stories. Two bear special mention. The first was from my favorite student in the class, a girl of maybe 10 named Noor. She has grasped the concepts of comics so well, and always goes above and beyond the assignment specifications. In this case, she asked to do a story about a family at work. The first panel shows a family hard at work, with the text explaining they own a sucessful factory. On the second page, disaster strikes - a fire burns down the factory, and the excellently drawn firetruck is not enough to save the factory. Instead, the mother/wife goes to work as a lawyer, with the the final page showing the closeup of the mother, and explaining that due to her hard work the family was able to maintain a great standard of living. The art is really well drawn, but more importantly uses different angles/shots and really supplements the story. But I am most impressed with the story itself. I'm not sure whether it is real or fiction, but either way it is remarkably creative.

The second story I mention is somewhat less uplifiting. The art is not particuarly captivating - the dad driving away from the house for work, the girl alone in the home - but the text itself is heart-wrenching. The story goes approximately like this:

1. My dad doesn't love me he abandons me when he goes to work.
2. I hate my dad I wish he wouldn't leave me all alone.
3. I get very frightened when I am left all alone in the house.
4. I wish my dad loved me more and wouldn't work so much

Wow. I was really speechless. This is an issue that goes beyond checkpoints and explosions, and touches upon simple but none-the-less powerful childhood neglect. I'll speak about my thoughts on what are role is in this situation in a future post, but for those who have thoughts on how to approach this issue, please let me hear them.