This TED Talk features cartoonist and teacher Gene Yang, recorded live at TEDx Manhattan Beach, 2016.

When I was in the fifth grade, I bought an issue of DC Comics Presents, number 57, off of a spinner rack at my local bookstore.

And that comic book changed my life.

The combination of words and pictures did something inside my head that had never been

done before, and I immediately fell in love with the medium of comics.

I became a voracious comic book reader, but I never brought them to school.

Instinctively, I knew that comic books didn't belong in the classroom.

My parents definitely were not fans, and I was certain that my teachers wouldn't be either.

After all, they never used them to teach. Comic books and graphic novels were never allowed during silent, sustained reading,

and they were never sold at our

annual book fair. Even so, I kept reading comics, and I even started making them. Eventually, I became a

published cartoonist writing and drawing comic books for a living. I also became a high school teacher.

This is where I taught Bishop O'Dowdowd High School in Oakland,

California. I taught a little bit of math and a little bit of art, but mostly computer science,

and I was there for 17 years. When I was a brand new teacher, I tried bringing comic books

into my classroom. I remember telling my students on the first day of every class

that I was also a cartoonist.

It wasn't so much that I was planning to teach them with comics.

It was more that I was hoping comics would make them think that I was cool.

I was wrong.

This was the 90s, so comic books didn't have the cultural cachet that they do today. My students didn't

think I was cool. They thought I was kind of a dork. And even worse, when stuff got hard in my class,

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