Rationale
I’m going to guess that for most (all?) of us, reading comics strips for a class will feel strange. I suspect we will alternate between two different experiences while reading:
- We’ll say, “Wow. That comic only took 10 seconds to read. Woot!” And we’ll move on to the next one. Within 10 minutes we’ll have read the whole assignment and feel pretty good about the choices we’ve made in picking classes this semester.
- We’ll say, “Wait a minute. This is for a class. In college. That obviously means there’s something more going on here. So, what on earth did that comic strip mean? I mean, mean mean. And why on earth are they called comics if they aren’t really all that, y’know, funny? Am I just stupid? Rats!” Then we’ll feel bad, proceed to rinse-and-repeat for 3 hours, and come to class feeling like a triple-decker hot fudge sundae of self-doubt and Peanuts-loathing.
This assignment hopes to short-circuit the first and give us strategies and opportunities to talk ourselves down from the second.
Nitty Gritty
For each day that we are reading Schulz’s comic strips in class, you will be responsible for leading a short, 5-minute discussion on two comic strips. This does not mean that you need to become an expert on them or have the most awesomest things™ to say ever. Rather, you will come up with a few questions that you believe can guide our conversation about those two strips.
Claim Your Strips
To ensure that we do not have overlap, you will claim two strips for each day’s discussion. Stake your claim by going to the Daily Comics Discussion post and editing that post to add the dates of your strips after your name on the day’s discussion. (Notice that Schulz always writes the dates of his strips in the lower corner of one of his panels.) You can grab your strips as early as you’d like, but no later than 9 am on the day of class.
Please note again that you do not need to choose strips that you think you understand (although that’s certainly an option). You can do just as well on this assignment if you choose comics that have left you baffled. In a way, you’re acting as a curator who has decided that particular strips in the day’s reading must be talked about during class, even if you only want to force the rest of us to talk about them.
Prep Your Strips
Prepare to lead the short discussion on your strips by composing a few questions. These questions can cover any aspect of the strips, including their relation to the comics that surround them. Remember that good discussion questions normally cannot be answered with a “yes” or “no.” Try for questions that begin with “What,” “Why,” or “How.” You could certainly draw on McCloud’s work when developing your questions.
The key word in the preceding paragraph is “prepare.” “Preparing” means that you’ve thought of your two or three questions before coming to class. You may very well want to jot them down, perhaps even in the margins of your book. I don’t anticipate asking you to turn these questions in, but that remains an option if I think it proves necessary.
Discuss Your Strips
In class, you will lead a short discussion about your strips. You will have the reins of the class for a minimum of five minutes. You might start by talking about why you picked the strips that you did, or you might launch right into a question.
Five minutes might sound like a long time. But honestly, one good question can easily put you beyond that mark. You might not even get to your second strip. That’s okay.
Please note the pedagogical aim of this assignment: a good discussion normally features more talking from the class than from the teacher. This means, again, that you really do not need to know everything about the strips. You just need to be able to ask a question or three that will get us talking productively.
Grading
Each day’s discussion is worth a maximum of 5 points, with the assignment as a whole being worth 50 points. You will be graded on
- your timeliness in claiming your poem for discussion
- the quality of your questions
- your work leading the class
Credits
This assignment was originally designed in Winter 2019 and focused on poetry. It worked so well that I decided to adapt it for our work on Peanuts. I’m always thankful for Sarah Aloe Peterson, who really helped me through teaching my first all-poetry class.
