REBROADCAST: Mr. Wolf’s Class

“Mr. Wolf’s Class” is a series of graphic novels for middle-grade readers by Portland elementary school teacher Aron Nels Steinke. He and his wife, Ariel Cohn, won an Eisner award for their book “Zoo Box” in 2014. We listen back to a conversation with Steinke from 2019 about teaching and about creating graphic novels for kids.

The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB, I’m Dave Miller. We turn now to a series of graphic novels by a Portland author. It is for and about elementary and middle school students, so it focuses on what they care about: things like playground disagreements, and nose picking, and fart jokes, plus a story about what it’s like to be the new kid in school. The series is called Mr. Wolf’s class, it’s written by Aron Nels Steinke, who knows his audience well, he is a fourth and fifth-grade teacher at Portland’s Woodstock Elementary School. We talked in September of 2019 when the third book in the series called “Lucky Stars” came out. We’re going to listen back to that conversation today. I started by asking how he would describe his series to an eight or a nine year old.

Aron Nels Steinke: You know, it’s kind of the everyday antics of a classroom. Students love reading the books because they can see themselves in it. So, there’s a cast of 17 students, and oftentimes I’ll hear from readers afterward, they’ll say “Oh, I’m the Dalmatian, I’m Henry,” or “I’m Abdi, the cat because he likes to play video games,” or “I’m Aziza because she likes to read.” So there’s a lot of different entry points for kids to identify and, and see themselves reflected in the book.

Miller: Was your entry point? How did you start working on Mr. Wolf’s Class?

Steinke: Well, I’ve been teaching and making books, making graphic novels, for about 10 years. And when I became a teacher, I had my first professionally published book at the same time. So when I became a teacher, and I was cartooning, I didn’t have a lot of time. And then I had a child, and-

Miller: All of a sudden, you found tons and tons of extra time.

Steinke: I know, it’s amazing how having a child will make you reflect and reconsider what free time really means, and how productive you can be.

So I found myself making comic strips about my teaching experience because it was immediate. It was something I experienced just that week, I would make a little comic strip about the week. For example, one time I was cleaning up after school and I drew Mr. Wolf cleaning up. He’s putting away pencils and he puts away a ruler, and then, and then he notices that something off in the corner underneath a bookshelf or under a table, and it looks like a note. I mean, you know, there’s anticipation, he walks over and he bends over, he’s really got to get down cause he’s tall like me, and he retrieves the note, but it’s been folded like eight times. So he has to spend some time unfolding it, wondering what could this note reveal about his students? And as soon as he opens it up, there’s only one word, and it says fart right in the middle. So those were the kinds of experiences that I wanted to share with other teachers

Miller: That was the initial audience, other teachers?

Steinke: Yeah, and I found that as I was doing them, I couldn’t resist sharing them with my own students. I would delete the words, and then print copies for students to fill in what they thought was happening, kind of like a social story, for kids to imagine what is going on.

Miller: Was the content a little bit different? I mean, there’s two ways to think about it: one is that just opened it up and made it a more imaginative exercise for them, another is that what you were exploring when this was for fellow teachers wasn’t necessarily what you’d want a third grader to read about.

Steinke: Exactly. It was a hard line to balance and this is the first time in my life I really did get that sense of “Oh, you should know your audience. Who are you writing to?” And when I figured out that the audience I really wanted was my students, that’s when I shifted. I began making Mr. Wolf’s Class, the graphic novel series, which ended up becoming more fiction than real anecdotes.

Miller: Why did you want that audience?

Steinke: Because I spend my time with kids! I’m an elementary school teacher, and that’s who I spend most of my time with. I want to give them something. I love watching and helping readers become readers, and it’s been incredibly rewarding to have that experience.

Miller: It’s not so draining that, when you’re done with teaching, you want to immerse yourself? I mean, you’re creating a fictional world. Theoretically, you could have a graphic novel series about adults in space. Instead, you’ve chosen to have, besides the animals stuff that we’ll get to, a very, very lifelike world. You put yourself, in your free time, right back in a classroom.

Steinke: Yeah, and I think that’s the age-old-ism of “write what you know.” Maybe there’s something I want to know how to do, and then I’ll have to do the research to do it. I don’t have the time, so I’m writing what I know. Maybe if I had chosen to be a firefighter or something else in my life, for example, I would be writing stories about that and fictionalizing my experience.

Miller: If you’re just tuning in, I’m talking right now with the award-winning comic book writer and graphic novelist, Aron Nels Steinke, he teaches fourth and fifth grade at Portland’s Woodstock Elementary School, and he is the author of the graphic novel series. Mr. Wolf’s Class.

How much is Mr. Wolf at this point, the teacher himself who is a Wolf, a version of you?

Steinke: Well, he started out as me. And he’s still me, but I would say 95% me. Obviously, I’m not a wolf, and I don’t wear glasses like he does, but he does have the same personality.

Miller: How would you describe his personality?

Steinke: Well, he’s well-meaning, but he’s not without flaws. But he’s not a fall guy either, he’s not there for comic relief necessarily, even though every once in a while a hot coffee will fall in his lap. He’s me, and I wanted to show and reflect an adult character who was trying, and also could make mistakes. I think that’s something I really try to show my students in class too, is that none of us have this figured out, we’re not a hundred percent perfect. We’re always making mistakes, and then we’re learning from those mistakes. Let’s say modeling writing. If I’m gonna model writing in front of my students, I’m going to do it just like I do it, and I make a lot of mistakes and I cross out my mistakes and I edit as I go. That’s the process of doing anything, is that you make a mistake and you reflect and you revise and you come back at it.

Miller: At one point, Mr. Wolf is presiding over a bunch of poorly behaved kids who are playing Foursquare. And one of his students comes up and says “Mr. Wolf, do you like being a teacher?” And he responds “Most of the time.” Is that your answer?

Steinke: Yeah, most of the time. I mean, of course, I love being a teacher, devoting my life to working with younger people and inspiring our future generation who have, honestly too much on their plate right now. I mean, there’s teachers, this is the first day of school for a lot of districts, they come in with this sense of purpose and hope and determination. But it’s not without its challenges. It’s definitely a challenging career. There’s a lot of teacher burnout. I know there’s statistics that go along with that. It’s a challenge, but it’s something worthy, and I get a lot out of it too.

Miller: We talk so much, and for really good reasons, about what it’s like for kids to go back to school. But I’m wondering about you, what are your hopes or dreams as a teacher for this school year that’s just starting? When you look back in June, what do you want to be able to say?

Steinke: So every year I come to school teaching, I’m always learning new things. I think my ultimate goal is always for me to learn new things and to inspire kids as well. I’m really excited about that new Oregon law, the Senate bill that allowed for the Oregon Department of Education to integrate Native American history into Oregon classrooms. That’s something I’ve been wanting for so long. I don’t think I’ve ever had the resources given to me. And so I’m really hopeful for that. And I want to learn with my students, that’s something, knowing about Native American history in Oregon is something I would like to know more about. It’s fun to learn new things as the students do too.

Miller: What’s your favorite feedback that you hear from young readers of your own work? What do you most want to hear from them?

Steinke: Well, I love to hear them say that they’ve read the book like four or five times because there’s nothing more satisfying to hear someone returned to something that you made over and over again. My favorite books and my favorite TV shows and movies are the ones that I like to come back to. That tells me maybe there’s something they missed the first time, there’s a reason why they’re returning to that work, so they can pick up something new or they find comfort in it. I’ve heard from parents and librarians and teachers that sometimes this is the first book that a child had read on their own and that they were so proud. And then they share that information with me, and it makes me feel really good to hear that like I’ve inspired kids to read who maybe never read before, either a reluctant reader or just a first-time developing reader.

Miller: What role do you think that graphic novels can play in getting kids to read books?

Steinke: Graphic novels are amazing for developing readers. My son is seven, and his reading is exploding right now. And a lot of the first books he was reading were graphic novels. I think probably many parents out there right now are gonna know the name Dog Man, which is Dav Pilkey’s best-selling graphic novel, by my publisher too. And those books are so engaging, graphic novels are such a great way for kids to have high engagement, high interest, and want to read, basically. I think there is some stigma, still, about kids reading comics and reading graphic novels. I don’t see it that often, but I know it exists. So I would encourage either teachers out there or parents, if you’re trying to get your kids to stop reading graphic novels, just take out the words “graphic novels,” and then what did you just try to get them to do?

Miller: In other words, it’s the same thing, they’re taking in visual information with the words in this case, and there should be no shame in that.

You’re saying that you have heard about that, but you haven’t experienced that?

Steinke: I have a little bit, but I think people come to me and they already know my mindset, I make graphic novels, I don’t think anybody’s gonna be willing to debate me on that.

I do want to say though, you mentioned literacy. There is an added element of visual literacy with graphic novels. There is a book by Chad Sell called Cardboard Kingdom, and I realized that when I was reading his book, he’s got these silent panel pages, and then he’s got pages with text, and I spent more time looking and keeping my eye on the page without the text. There’s a lot of uncovering and discovering and looking for connections and meaning in the visuals that happens in comics.

Miller: Let’s turn to the animal world that you have created here. You mentioned a dalmatian, I mentioned, Mr. Wolf being a wolf, there are a lot of animals here though, all the characters are animals, a frog, a rabbit, a pig, cats, dogs, why people (that’s not the right word,) “character” your world with all these different animals, all interacting and all sitting in classes together?

Steinke: Well, like I said, I was starting out making Mr. Wolf as these little mini-comics and comic strips about my teaching experience. I had come out of a long run of making autobiographical comics, where I drew myself as myself, and as I became a teacher, working with children, I decided I should probably try to hide my identity a little bit and protect the identity of my students. That was one reason. I made it very confusing. Like, how could you know that person is that person because they’re drawn as a duck or they’re drawn as a cat. So there weren’t any visual likenesses between the real kids and the anthropomorphs that I drew.

I think another reason is it’s just, I think, fun to draw animal characters. It’s something that I’ve been raised on. I think a lot of the Disney anthropomorphism, like Disney’s Robin Hood, was a big influence. As well, I think it’s easy for kids to kind of - this is also a point of contention, if you’re showing a diverse cast of students, it’s important to show how people physically really look, which is something I didn’t do. I think I show some, let’s say Aziza, who is a young Muslim girl, and she’s portrayed as a duck and she wears a hijab. And so there’s little things that I try to put in there that show that this is a very diverse school, very similar to schools I’ve worked in.

Miller: But the human diversity is mapped onto, in subtle ways, whether it’s a name or what people are wearing, that’s how we read it, as opposed to say, seeing skin tones.

Steinke: Exactly. It’s more subtle, and I don’t know if that’s good or bad, but it’s just the way I approached it, and I like drawing animal characters.

Miller: Mr. Wolf never eats his students, so far in the three books I read, even though he does have animal students that I imagine an actual Wolf would find tasty. Is this just because he’s a good teacher?

Steinke: In my mind, they’re still human, and Mr. Wolf is me, and I’m a vegetarian.

Miller: The gender of your characters too is not always obvious, which seems like a kind of analog to what you were just saying before. I kept misunderstanding who they were because unlike in a lot of art that has anthropomorphic characters where the artist goes to great extent to put long hair and a barrette, say, on a cat, or to put them in pink, you don’t do any of this sort of weirdly gendered aspects of animal life, they’re just animals. And then halfway through a book or the series I realize “Oh, no, it’s actually a boy character, it’s a girl character.” Why did you decide to do that?

Steinke: I don’t think I decided to do that, I think it just happened. It’s great that you described it that way because it is difficult to know a character’s gender, unless they use their gender pronoun.

Miller: Which is increasingly like the world we live in.

Steinke: I also kind of mess with that too, like there’s a girl cat named Randy, and I liked that she had a boy’s name and she’s just funny, kinda acts a little tomboyish. Physically, for kids who are prepubescent, you can’t tell sometimes. So there has to be signifiers such as clothing or whatever. Oftentimes you don’t even know. You can ask, politely, and they can tell you what their gender pronouns are. But, in my books, I guess I like that it’s confusing to some people because I don’t know if it matters, or maybe it’s something that you discover kind of like you discover in real life.

Miller: As I mentioned, “Lucky Stars” just came out today. But this is a series, are you already working on number four?

Steinke: Yeah, I’m working on number four right now. I have to finish all the pencils, so I have about 20 to go.

Miller: Aron Nels Steinke, thanks very much. It was great talking with you.

Steinke: Thank you, Dave.

Miller: That’s the writer and artist, Aron Nels Steinke in conversation in 2019. That next book in the Mr. Wolf series that he was working on has come out, it’s called “Field Trip”.

Tomorrow on the show, we’re going to talk with the journalist Katie Engelhart. Her new book is called “The Inevitable: Dispatches on the Right to Die”. It’s based on years of reporting on people who are using laws like Oregon’s pioneering Death with Dignity Act, and with people who say those laws don’t go far enough.

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