Reading Inclusively: A Conversation with Gene Luen Yang
SK: You mentioned before that you’re an advocate for STEM education, and you are a coder by background, and then moved to the classroom to teach computer science to high school students. But you’re also a comic book writer and artist.
Kids these days seem to get the message that you’re either a math person or a creative person. It’s an either/or. It’s so interesting that you do both. How do you see them interacting?
GLY: It’s an artificial wall, and that’s one of the walls I’m talking about in Reading Without Walls. There have been plenty of people in history that have been interested in both. Steve Jobs said something like, “The future belongs to people who understand both art and technology.” I think that’s very true. You can use STEM in order to create art. You can use art in order to push STEM. Those are both things that I want to do.
SK: Speaking of STEM, I love Secret Coders. I love what 
you’re trying to do. I wish I’d had these books growing up. I actually do the puzzles in it—it’s not too late to learn!
GLY: That’s awesome! You’re the perfect reader.
I taught computer science at the high school level for 17 years. I have to tell you, it’s very difficult to predict what kids will take to coding. But there’s not a strong correlation between math and kids good at it!
SK: There’s a book called Geek Sublime by Vikram Chandra, and it talks about coding as art, and compares it to beautiful languages.
GLY: There absolutely is an art to it. You can look at a piece of code and say, “This is a beautiful, elegant piece of code,” or “This is not. This is garbage,” but ultimately they can do the same thing.
SK: As an educator, what role do you think comics has in the classroom?
GLY: I think there’s a lot of fear that comics is going to replace prose. And that is definitely not going to happen, and not something I want. But comics are part of the teacher’s toolkit. There are just certain things that are better communicated through comics.
This is something that I figured out in my classroom. Years ago, one of our math teachers had to go on long-term leave, and I was asked to sub in for his Algebra II class. I was also the school’s educational technologist at the time, which meant that I had to work with other teachers on fitting computer technology into their curriculum. And what that meant for this Algebra II class was that every couple of weeks, I would have to miss 2 or 3 sessions. To make up for that, I started videotaping myself doing lectures and asking my sub to play it for the kids. That did not go over very well. As a second try, I would draw the concepts out as comics. Really quickly, they were super sketchy. But I asked the sub to Xerox them and hand them out. And those worked really well. That was really surprising, I thought they’d like learning from a screen better. When I talked to them, the reason why they liked it was because it was visual, unlike reading their textbooks, and there are certain math concepts you can picture better in your head if you see it visually.
I was also drawing on the board during those lectures, so it was visual, but with comics, past, present, and future all sit side by side on the page. So they could control how quickly or how slowly they read, and they could reread passages over and over again. Those things just make comics a particularly unique way of conveying information and teaching that other mediums just don’t have.
