I’m jealous. When I was a kid, bringing a comic book to school was a capital offense.

Now, some schools actually encourage students to read comics.

That’s the case at Cypress Bay High School in Broward County, Fla., where students can enroll in a course called "Literature and the Arts/Graphic Novels."

In this class, teacher Margarete Marchetti seeks to promote literacy among “reluctant readers who might not pick up anything besides a comic book,” reports the Sun-Sentinel.

According to Marchetti, her students aren’t reading the latest exploits of Superman or Batman. Graphic novels have longer and more complex story lines, and the “literary” works she has selected include a memoir about a Polish Jew surviving the Holocaust and a woman’s childhood after the Iranian revolution.

“Almost every assignment involves some sort of critical thinking, through writing, creating, and illustrating,” the Sun-Sentinel reports. And, by the end of the course, Marchetti “wants her students to transfer the skills they use to read comics into other materials.”

Some people might raise an eyebrow at this approach. But it’s more common than you’d think. The Teachers College at Columbia University supports a Comic Book Project, and hundreds of in-school and afterschool programs using comic books exist across the nation.

And there’s at least one education publisher printing comic book accounts of the lives of Queen Elizabeth I, Anne Frank, and Julius Caesar.

I leave it to you: Is this idea just plain stupid? Or is it an innovative way to encourage struggling and uninterested young readers—and put some fun back in learning?

Del Stover, Senior Editor