We’ve been hearing that a lot. Increasingly, teachers in our audience are reporting that a handful of their students—shy kids, hyperactive kids, highly creative kids—are suddenly doing better with remote learning than they were doing in the physical classroom. “It’s been awesome to see some of my kids finally find their niche in education,” said Holli Ross, a first-year high school teacher in northern California, echoing the sentiments of dozens of teachers we’ve heard from. That’s not to say it’s the norm. Many students are struggling to adapt to remote learning: Digital access and connectivity remain a pervasive equity issue; stay-at-home orders have magnified existing problems in familial dynamics; and, universally, teachers and students grapple with how to replicate the engagement and discourse from an in-person classroom.

The book is an excellent summative text for the course because it brings together the historical, ideological, philosophical, and artistic viewpoints that students had engaged with throughout the semester. 

At first glance, this might seem like a simple assignment, but it requires higher order thinking. It required students not just to understand the story of the character in question, but also to apply this understanding by retelling the story in their own (German) words. Students did not just demonstrate reading comprehension; the assignment forced them to identify key details in the story in order to make the story fit the limited number of panels available.