Erik Sagrero – Blog 6: The Best We Could Do
From the list of links that was provided in the recourse guide I selected the website, Comic Book Resources (CBR). After spending some time looking through the list I felt that CBR could be the most useful resources to understand which comic book are currently relevant to what young students are actually reading. CBR provides an abundance of different information like comic book forums, comic reviews and previews on comics are will be released at a later time. One thing that the CBR website provides that many be helpful to a teacher or student is that it features blogs that focus on a certain genres and authors. As a future teacher I would use this website as a way to get insight on popular comic books so that I have the ability to recommend good comics to students who enjoy them. I would also encourage students to post their own reviews on comic books they’ve already read and explain what they liked/disliked about the book.
The Best We Could Do was a story about the journey Thi Bui and her family took in order to resettle and find an area they could call home. Thi story is actually quite sad, as a child she craved attention and love from her parents. In her eyes her parents weren’t always there and as supportive as they should have been so as she got older she began looking at her family’s history. With her curiosity she began looking back at her father and mothers past to see why they were there and why they weren’t as loving. As the story progresses we learn that as a child her father experienced heartbreaking events that left him scarred and scared, while her mother would have been much happier if she had gone through with her plan of studying abroad and living the life she had planned for if she wasn’t married. I really enjoyed the novel and like how Thi used visuals to give the reader a look at the types of emotions that she felt. As a future teacher, recommending graphic novels to students who aren’t very fond of reading would be a good idea. Since the panels in comic books are lines of conversations/ideas it doesn’t seem like you’re actually reading a book but by the end of it you’ve learned the story of Thi Bui.
Before I answer the question I should admit that this is the first time I’ve read and completed a graphic novel. When I first opened the book I looked through the pages to see the art and get an idea of what I was going to read. Without actually reading the pages I was able develop an idea of what the novel was going to be about and how the emotions would change through the chapters. Once I looked through the artwork I began my first attempt to read it, at first I was confused and uninterested. After some attempts I began by looking at each panel and reading the text and looking at the picture related to it to make sense of it all. By the second chapter of The Best We Could Do, I began to enjoy how comics provide visuals for the conversations that were happening. The visuals showed the sadness, heartbreak, pain, and joy that Thi was feeling throughout the book. I liked the support it offered and was something different than the pictures my mind was creating. When comparing the way I read The Best We Could Do their to how someone reading a different graphic novel nothing changed, the only thing that was different is how the author wrote and used the visuals to support their words.