I've often had English teachers and parents of students I've tutored describe this scenario: "I want my students/kids to learn to read and enjoy reading, but they don't. They don't understand what they're reading and they get bored. The book loses their interest. They'll never learn to read if they keep abandoning books." Everyone's first solution to this problem - comic books. Without a second thought - comic books. Automatically - comic books. As if comic books are some divine savior for kids who don't like to read. I can tell you they certainly are!
Kids usually don't like reading at first because they're not good at it; they're still learning how to do it. Throw a comic book in their hands and an unexplainable miracle happens - they learn how to read! All of a sudden they start saying things like "a apple" and writing "your beautiful" and I can't imagine why. It certainly isn't because comic books tend to be grammatically incorrect. Comic books are the SparkNotes for elementary school, and we all know how much those help students learn for themselves!
So I think one day, when I become a mom, I'll just throw some comic books in front of my kids' faces and say their short attention spans are fixed. They'll be able to recount the whole story to me not because comic books have pictures and they have memorization skills, but because reading one Captain Underpants makes you a reading genius!
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