In July 2019, middle school math teacher Jim McClain told to the South Bend Tribune that one of the first words he spoke as a child was “Batman.” Although whether that assertion is true or not is left for conjecture, there is little doubt that McClain’s life and career has been influenced by superheroes nonetheless.
His eventual love for math, meanwhile, was pretty much nonexistent in his youth. When he later became a middle school teacher, he thus understood that many of his students felt the same way. In order to make the subject more interesting, McClain began inserting superheroes into the word problems that were part of his worksheet assignments.
“All of a sudden, my worksheets were fun,” he says. “I was like, ‘This is awesome.’ Eventually, I had a couple hundred of them. I was like, ‘OK, I can make a book out of this.’ Just one problem with that: copyright. So I couldn’t use those (characters) because somebody already owned them.”
Instead of being deterred, Jim McClain devised a workaround – he created his own comic book superheroes and used them in class instead. “The Flash, especially, was one of my favorites to go to, because whenever I needed to do any kind of math facts … I would use the Flash as the host,” McClain explained to AIPT. “So the kids would know they were intended to work on it fairly quickly. So, I came up with a character, for example, named Abscissa, who runs horizontally along the x-axis at super speed. So I just replaced the Flash with an analog of the Flash, more or less, but the thing is, as I then developed the characters, they took on more personality, and now they’re virtually unrecognizable, except for a few common powers.”
While creating a character with superspeed loosely based on the Flash may seem easy enough, filling an entire roster of superheroes based on mathematical concepts was a more daunting task. As a result, it took Jim McClain seven years to complete his first comic book, Solution Squad #1. In the end, however, he discovered that it was well worth the wait.
“The very first time I had the comic book, I did a presentation at C2E2 – which is the big convention in Chicago – it was 2013 and, literally, the week my comics were in my hand,” he remembers. “The first time I introduced it, to teachers, there was wild applause. People swarmed around me after, saying, ‘This is the most creative thing I’ve ever seen a teacher do.’” McClain sold eighty-three copies of Solution Squad #1 that day. He then spent the next few years expanding the narrative into a 132-page graphic novel that was released on Kickstarter in 2017.
“The graphic novel is an expansion of the first 24-page story,” McClain told AIPT, which focused on prime numbers. “It goes into prime factorization in the second story, and we use prime factorization as a metaphor for determining the identity of a mystery villain. Prime factorization is when you break a number down into numbers that only divide by 1 and themselves. And every number has a unique prime factorization, and that prime factorization only belongs to that number. So it’s sort of like DNA testing. If you check someone’s DNA, you’re going to figure out who the person is.”
Another story in the Solution Squad graphic novel tackles both bullying and Fahrenheit-to-Celsius conversion, while a third features an encounter with a candy-based supervillain known as the Confectioneer that leads to calculating the sugar content contained in soda.
It wasn’t just mathematics that Jim McClain was trying to promote, however, but diversity within the field of STEM as well. “To get girls to learn math was a challenge for me from decades ago, because they don’t think they are any good at it,” he explained to the South Bend Tribune. “Fortunately, we’ve advanced, but back in the day, that was a challenge to get girls to think they were good at math…. Girls can do math just fine, thank you very much. So I balanced the group (of characters) that way just for that purpose, the racial and cultural blending came from my students.”
Like with the first issue of the Solution Squad comic book, the Solution Squad graphic novel was an immediate success, earning an Excellence in Graphic Literature nomination from Pop Culture Classroom in 2017. The following year, the now defunct nonprofit named Jim McClain its Pop Culture Educator of the Year.
Although McClain retired from teaching in 2019, he did bring the Solution Squad back for one final adventure the following year with another Kickstarter campaign. In the main narrative of Solution Squad Holiday Special, the superheroes create action figures based on themselves as holiday presents for the kids in their neighborhood and need to calculate the correct height of each one so that it is proportional to their real-life sizes.
“I would describe the Solution Squad as a team of teenage, math-themed superheroes in the tradition of Bronze Age comics,” he explained to AIPT at the time for those unfamiliar with the superheroes. “It’s kind of like X-Men Evolution meets Numb3rs. My heroes always try to do the right thing and to solve problems with brains first, and brawn second. And moreover, they smile. The heroes of my youth don’t smile much anymore.”
Middle school students likewise seldom smiled when it came to mathematics before Jim McClain came along, but thanks to Solution Squad, math and smiles now go hand-in-hand both in and out of the classroom.
Anthony Letizia