In my fourth week, I’m finalizing my lesson plan for the comic book-related assignment. I know how to make a comic, but I had serious concerns over the potential learning curve that may come from this assignment. The idea is that this is a medium the students can use to express themselves in their multimodal final assignment. I know the comic book angle could work for this easily, but my concern is the potential issue with making the art for the comic because comic books/graphic novels are a visually heavy medium. I didn’t want to discourage the students from attempting to use this medium themselves, all because maybe they can’t or don’t want to draw. Alternatives can be done for this, but in my personal opinion, it somewhat diminishes the overall flair of making a personal comic to oneself. After lengthy deliberations with Dr. Barattin, she explained the assignment could be as simple as one page (which could have anywhere between 6-9 panels on it, depending). I figured I may have been making the lesson harder than it may have needed to be, but this is a known issue of mine; I’m a bit of a perfectionist at times, especially in realms I know I’m most knowledgeable in. My resolve was to teach the overall point of the assignment, which is to express oneself or detail something about the individual student. I think it may be best to teach that process, and whatever the students come up with, I think, will lead to many cool and creative happy accidents.
