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Drawing restraint
A different picture of Bill Ayers emerges in his new graphic novel.
The myth about Bill Ayers that emerged during the 2008 U.S. presidential election—that as Barack Obama’s terrorist BFF, he ghostwrote Dreams From My Father—seems less outlandish than this fact: The cofounder of the Weather Underground taught preschool while on the run from the FBI.
It’s hard to square the bombs and manifestos in Ayers’s past with his 23-year career as a professor at UIC, from which he’s retiring this summer; and the praise he’s received from Mayor Richard M. Daley, among others, as an education reformer. But when we ask Ayers, 65, how he reconciles these two aspects of his life, the Glen Ellyn native says, “Teaching has always been linked in my mind to social justice.”
That attitude shapes To Teach: The Journey, In Comics (Teachers College Press, $15.95), which is the third edition of Ayers’s popular 1993 book To Teach: The Journey of a Teacher—and the first to use comics to bolster arguments against standardized testing. Ayers co-authored this edition with Ryan Alexander-Tanner, 27, a Xeric Award–winning comics artist who was Ayers’s brother Rick’s student at Berkeley High School.
To Teach follows protagonist Bill and his endearing kindergarten class for one year, detouring to examine innovative ways to engage students and real-life challenges new teachers have faced. Most of the book is drawn from Ayers’s career as a teacher, which began in 1965 at an alternative school in Ann Arbor, Michigan, only a few weeks after his first arrest as an anti-war and civil-rights activist.
“I had no idea that I would ever be a teacher,” Ayers explains, “[but] I found in teaching young children, and eventually teaching at every level, the most interesting set of intellectual demands and ethical challenges.” Ayers left teaching for several years after he and Weather Underground cofounder Bernardine Dohrn, now his wife, went into hiding. When he became an assistant at his son Zayd’s New York preschool in 1978, it was under an assumed name. Less than a decade later, after he’d turned himself in and the federal charges against him were dropped, Ayers earned a Ph.D. in education from Columbia University.
Alexander-Tanner, who’s temporarily living in Brooklyn, first crossed paths with Ayers when he interviewed him about the Weather Underground for a tenth-grade history project. (His teacher agreed he could do the assignment as a comic book after the aspiring artist showed her Art Spiegelman’s Maus.) When he was invited to collaborate on To Teach, Alexander-Tanner moved into Ayers and Dohrn’s Hyde Park home for five months.
Translating To Teach into sequential art was “a huge challenge,” the artist tells us by phone. “The tricky part was that it wasn’t a story.” Bill and his fictional students, created for this edition, transform Ayers’s ideas into a narrative, so that we root for the kids whether they’re learning about physics by building a bridge for their class turtle or encountering administrators eager to diagnose them with ADD. Images enhance the story’s flow. Joking that he’s “still pissed about it,”Ayers proudly shows us how Alexander-Tanner condensed his six pages of text about stimulating educational environments into a single illustration of kids reading, painting and playing chess in a relaxed, cheerful space. Though the book’s aimed at teachers, its reasonable suggestions that people can learn from hands-on experience and cooperation (and comics) probably will interest parents, activists and pretty much anyone who worries about the American educational system.
“Schools want kids to be static,” Ayers laments, adding that teachers should see students “as three-dimensional creatures” instead of reducing them to labels like “at risk.” This view of human nature seems more open-minded than the Weather Underground’s. Indeed, Ayers says he regrets the group’s “impulse to be pure and push complexity away,” though he’s not sorry the group turned to “extreme vandalism” to protest the Vietnam War, just that it never questioned “[its] own dogma.” Today, when students ask him how they should fight for social justice, he urges them to reach out to people who might not share their beliefs. “I say, ‘Have you talked to your Republican parents?’”
Ayers and Alexander-Tanner read from To Teach at Quimby’s Saturday 19.
