American Born Chinese

It's hard to say how a book will be gauged by students when you give them a book. Some may say that all books given to them by teachers makes it automatically a "bad" book and therefore they do not want to read it or even put forth effort towards understanding any part of it. American Born Chinese has a twist that I have not yet seen in the classroom. It is a graphic novel which I thought was only something people read in their free time. This brings in a whole new type of reading into the classroom to encourage kids to actually read. I liked graphic novels in high school and I would have loved to read one for class because I found them more fun and interactive. I find that reading with pictures makes reading more fun for those reading.

With our students we could have them take a passage from another book or even something they wrote themselves and create their own graphic novel. It would be fun and the students would have to take the details from the story to illustrate their graphic novel.

American Born Chinese is about kids in school and so this allows students to see more situations than the ones that they are in. I find that so many books that I read in high school were "outdated" and I didn't like that I could not easily relate with what was going on with the characters in the story. I wanted to relate but found it often to difficult because they were from another time and place. With American Born Chinese it was all about real life, I felt.