Comics/Education Post: Mimei Sakamoto is an asshat, but she's right
I am not an educator. Matt Thorn is, but he's got better things to do with his time than write ranty blog entries, so this is where I come in. I am not an educator, but my mother has two decades of experience in early-child development, and I used to help out at her nursery school in my pre-tween years because she couldn't leave me and my sister home alone. Not only but also, I spent three years tutoring basic calculus and physics in college, as well as two and a half years as a chemistry lab assistant, so I know a few things about the challenges faced by students learning the ways of math and science.
So when I see that Japan's educational system has resorted to infusing their textbooks with teh powar of manga, it tees me off something fierce. Apparently it also tees off Mimei Sakamoto, who may be better known for her anti-otaku fandom wank, but actually makes a good point this time. Stuffing school textbooks with "kewl, fun, trendy comicks" is not going to magically make the subject easier to grasp. It might make it more entertaining—I like the idea of schoolkids traveling in time to meet famous mathematicians, and let's face it, manga is entertainment first and foremost—but mastering these technical subjects still demands effort. Trying to hide those demands behind a comic-book facade is a complete disservice.
Dear Educators:
Please stop using comics as a crutch for flawed teaching methods. It is embarrassing to the students and insulting to the artform.
Consider, if you will, the following multiple-choice question:
What is the best way to learn math and other technical subjects?
(A) Listening to Mozart
(B) Playing Brain Age on Nintendo
(C) Reading a comic about it
(D) Hard work and study
Think about it for a second. Yeah.
Now, from my studies and tutoring, this is what I have come to grasp: Mathematics is a language. It is a symbolic language, dealing with highly abstract concepts, which makes it quite different from other human languages ("This is a pen!"), but still a language nonetheless. Yet it is often taught as if it were some mysterious, arcane brand of numerical sorcery that is only accessible to born geniuses, which is why we get this surfeit of Kids Who Suck At Math. It doesn't have to be this way. I mean, how do kids learn English? How do they learn Japanese? By being surrounded by their mother tongues all day everyday and getting countless opportunities to use it. Now imagine that a child were exposed to countless opportunities to perform basic arithmetic, quantitative comparisons, geometry and topology, logic-puzzle solving ... and eventually that child would understand "Mathematese" quite fluently. But no, too many are exposed to the subject as if it were some secret code that only smart kids get, and so they seal themselves off from it before they ever have a chance to try to understand it and get good at it.
Worse yet is that, even if it weren't covered with this aura of "Mathematics is too difficult and it's not for you," the subject is just plain taught incorrectly. Instead of being taught as a language, it's often taught as a series of drills and formulas that don't reveal any sense or purpose to the student. No wonder they're not getting into math! How good would YOU be at a foreign language if you were taught to parrot "This is a pen" and "I'm fine thank you, and you" 500 times over? Yet this is exactly how mathematics is presented, especially among East Asian students, once you get past the kiddie years. Oh, you'll get a fair share of geniuses and circus freaks who can recite the first whatever digits of pi, but how many, once they're past voting age, can still remember the Law of Cosines? Eh?
On the reverse side are these misguided reformers who think they can reinvent math education by stuffing it with distractions. "New Math," full-color textbooks, mathematician profiles in the margins, real world applications that you'd never actually use in the real world*. And now comes this ridiculous new distraction, in the form of manga.
*Admittedly, late high-school and college mathematics are advanced to the level where it DOES get difficult to find genuine applications; partial differential equations can be used to model traffic patterns, and quantization theory is the basis of how JPGs are compressed, etc. etc., but stuff like that is pretty much beyond the average person unless you're specializing in that field. So advanced mathematics often becomes a case of leveling up just for the sake of leveling up.
Comics, in themselves, will not solve these gross problems of math education. Comics might make students more entertained, and more passionate about the subject, but the medium, by itself, is not going to instantly bestow mathematical understanding upon struggling learners. The student has to put in the work, and the teacher has to be willing to take them there. We already know that comics will not teach you the Japanese language. So what hope could it possibly have for teaching the mathematical language?
This is not to say that comics do not have the power to educate. They can provide an entertaining framework for educational material, as long as you're not getting too involved. I once did a high school project on the Properties and Uses of Silicon where I presented my findings as a one-page comic, but it was basically a hotchpotch of classmate in-jokes and overdone gags, and should not be read by anyone, ever.
And really, how many seriously good, educational comics are there out there? Have you ever really learned a subject from the ground up just by plowing through a graphic novel or somesuch? Like, I know plenty about Beethoven, but I learned Beethoven by playing and listening to his music, thankyouverymuch, which is a far more involving experience than 150 pages of Astro Boy and bishie Ludwig. Trying to use comics as a magical key to learning non-comics subjects makes about as much sense as, say, trying to learn math by listening to Mozart.
In my mind, there is only one truly great educational comic:
Okay, maybe two:
But these are extreme rarities in a field littered with junky drawings and worse pedagogy. A field where desperate educators, for lack of ideas, think that they can use cutesy cartoon characters and dynamic panels and speech bubbles as a substitute for, I don't know, actual education maybe.
So when I see that Japan's educational system has resorted to infusing their textbooks with teh powar of manga, it tees me off something fierce. Apparently it also tees off Mimei Sakamoto, who may be better known for her anti-otaku fandom wank, but actually makes a good point this time. Stuffing school textbooks with "kewl, fun, trendy comicks" is not going to magically make the subject easier to grasp. It might make it more entertaining—I like the idea of schoolkids traveling in time to meet famous mathematicians, and let's face it, manga is entertainment first and foremost—but mastering these technical subjects still demands effort. Trying to hide those demands behind a comic-book facade is a complete disservice.
Dear Educators:
Please stop using comics as a crutch for flawed teaching methods. It is embarrassing to the students and insulting to the artform.
Consider, if you will, the following multiple-choice question:
What is the best way to learn math and other technical subjects?
(A) Listening to Mozart
(B) Playing Brain Age on Nintendo
(C) Reading a comic about it
(D) Hard work and study
Think about it for a second. Yeah.
Now, from my studies and tutoring, this is what I have come to grasp: Mathematics is a language. It is a symbolic language, dealing with highly abstract concepts, which makes it quite different from other human languages ("This is a pen!"), but still a language nonetheless. Yet it is often taught as if it were some mysterious, arcane brand of numerical sorcery that is only accessible to born geniuses, which is why we get this surfeit of Kids Who Suck At Math. It doesn't have to be this way. I mean, how do kids learn English? How do they learn Japanese? By being surrounded by their mother tongues all day everyday and getting countless opportunities to use it. Now imagine that a child were exposed to countless opportunities to perform basic arithmetic, quantitative comparisons, geometry and topology, logic-puzzle solving ... and eventually that child would understand "Mathematese" quite fluently. But no, too many are exposed to the subject as if it were some secret code that only smart kids get, and so they seal themselves off from it before they ever have a chance to try to understand it and get good at it.
Worse yet is that, even if it weren't covered with this aura of "Mathematics is too difficult and it's not for you," the subject is just plain taught incorrectly. Instead of being taught as a language, it's often taught as a series of drills and formulas that don't reveal any sense or purpose to the student. No wonder they're not getting into math! How good would YOU be at a foreign language if you were taught to parrot "This is a pen" and "I'm fine thank you, and you" 500 times over? Yet this is exactly how mathematics is presented, especially among East Asian students, once you get past the kiddie years. Oh, you'll get a fair share of geniuses and circus freaks who can recite the first whatever digits of pi, but how many, once they're past voting age, can still remember the Law of Cosines? Eh?
On the reverse side are these misguided reformers who think they can reinvent math education by stuffing it with distractions. "New Math," full-color textbooks, mathematician profiles in the margins, real world applications that you'd never actually use in the real world*. And now comes this ridiculous new distraction, in the form of manga.
*Admittedly, late high-school and college mathematics are advanced to the level where it DOES get difficult to find genuine applications; partial differential equations can be used to model traffic patterns, and quantization theory is the basis of how JPGs are compressed, etc. etc., but stuff like that is pretty much beyond the average person unless you're specializing in that field. So advanced mathematics often becomes a case of leveling up just for the sake of leveling up.
Comics, in themselves, will not solve these gross problems of math education. Comics might make students more entertained, and more passionate about the subject, but the medium, by itself, is not going to instantly bestow mathematical understanding upon struggling learners. The student has to put in the work, and the teacher has to be willing to take them there. We already know that comics will not teach you the Japanese language. So what hope could it possibly have for teaching the mathematical language?
This is not to say that comics do not have the power to educate. They can provide an entertaining framework for educational material, as long as you're not getting too involved. I once did a high school project on the Properties and Uses of Silicon where I presented my findings as a one-page comic, but it was basically a hotchpotch of classmate in-jokes and overdone gags, and should not be read by anyone, ever.
And really, how many seriously good, educational comics are there out there? Have you ever really learned a subject from the ground up just by plowing through a graphic novel or somesuch? Like, I know plenty about Beethoven, but I learned Beethoven by playing and listening to his music, thankyouverymuch, which is a far more involving experience than 150 pages of Astro Boy and bishie Ludwig. Trying to use comics as a magical key to learning non-comics subjects makes about as much sense as, say, trying to learn math by listening to Mozart.
In my mind, there is only one truly great educational comic:
Okay, maybe two:
But these are extreme rarities in a field littered with junky drawings and worse pedagogy. A field where desperate educators, for lack of ideas, think that they can use cutesy cartoon characters and dynamic panels and speech bubbles as a substitute for, I don't know, actual education maybe.
5 Comments:
Ditto!
Throw Making Comics onto the list, and I'd make a case for Philosophy for Beginners and the first six chapters of The Cartoon History of the Universe. But I know what you mean. Educators who use comics tend not to do any quality checks.
While I certainly get your point, I do have to concede that the Japanese education system needs something, anything, gimmicky enough to hold teenager attention in class. This is the land of the escalator system; in order to graduate, you need only be breathing and somewhere in the vicinity of the classroom, if even that much. I’m constantly amazed when students walk in and instantly pass out asleep on their desks- the whole system needs reform, but this is Japan, so that’s not going to happen. If they want to bring in their comics, fine, let ‘em have their comics. You can only go up from rock bottom.
I had similar reservations about Self-Made Hero's Manga Shakespeare. There was a strong whiff of "let's make Shakespeare fun by adding some holograms and yakuza!" (Y'know, 'cause kids today like the manga!) The resulting editions weren't particularly good as manga or as glosses on the Bard. The creators seem to have forgotten that Shakespeare is like Sophocles and Pushkin: most of the action takes place off stage (or before the start of the play), so adding car chases and sword fights doesn't actually shed much light on the language--the real stumbling block for most high school students.
Moreover, if I were a 15 year old Naruto fan, I suspect I'd view these books with disdain, as the artwork just isn't on the level with your average Shonen Jump or Shojo Beat title.
I seem to come across a lot of conflicting opinions regarding the quality of the Japanese education system. Some say their kids are amazing problem solvers, others say they can only do rote learning. Anyone know which is the "more correct" view?
On a slightly different note, I like the system at some ?most? American high schools, where the motivated kids can take AP classes, and the kids-who-won't-learn-no-matter-what-you-do take easier courses.
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