Chapter 5

I'm going to make a bold claim: Gallagher is biased.

I suppose I'll explain; he is an English teacher, so he relates everything back to reading.  While I agree, other subjects would be more difficult, and likely impossible, without the ability to read, I don't think reading alone will fix everything.  The was Gallagher talks in Chapter 5, the focus should be more on how to rebuild our entire education philosophy rather than just ending readicide.
I was placed in a middle school science classroom earlier this semester where the textbooks used were concept based.  The idea was that the students would develop basic scientific thought, and a genuine interest in science with a broad understanding and firm foundation to continue in science classes.  The teacher has been using this set of instructional materials for five years and has heard from the teachers in grade levels above hers that the students really do have a great conceptual understanding of the sciences.  BUT (don't you hate it when something good has a big but in the middle) the teacher is constantly being reprimanded. Her test scores have significantly dropped since this curriculum has been used, because there are not a ton of facts, actually, there's very little detailed content available in the information from the book.  So, to please the government and school leaders, she has a class set of the old school, fact based, boring, overwhelming, science textbooks.  She will get these out a couple weeks before the test and drill facts into the student's heads... they will remember some and do alright on the tests.  This fact cramming and testing is completely pointless, as the students have a great understanding of the concepts behind the class, and a general desire to continue with learning science.  There is a poor form of assessing, and because the students are learning through this new curriculum, the teacher suffers.  We just can't win.

Readicide or learnicide... something's got to change, and it's got to be something from the higher ups in education.   As Gallagher advocates, we need to get back to our creative, risk taking, can-do spirit and encourage expanded thinking, starting in our schools!

Chapter 4

Chapter 4 of Readicide is all about finding the happy medium in teaching (reading)... I agree and would expand this philosophy throughout any content area of teaching! The more you push something on a student, the less they are going to enjoy or remember the positives in it.  At the same time, if you abandon the students to learn (anything, not limited to reading) without much discipline, they will quickly give up.

My boyfriend is currently in medical school, where the entire curriculum is reading based.  He is expected to read, and ultimately teach himself, thousands of pages of  intense scientific material (not exaggerating) in a six week block.  This is obviously going to take a disciplined student, but even the medical school doesn't make the students fend for themselves. There are required group sessions that meet three times a week to discuss the reading and allow the students to struggle through their understanding together. The students also have the option of attending resources, where the professor responsible for a certain portion of material describes verbally the information the students have already read, and allows for a time of questioning.  If the, obviously well achieving, medical school students still need this scaffolding, why would teachers ever turn students loose without any sort of structure or preview?!  It is however important that these students struggle through their excessive reading, so that they are equipped to discuss and have a well rounded understanding of the material.  In the same manner, I should provide my science students with material they should struggle through, and guide them in a manner that forces them to think and develop learning habits without drowning them in boring science jargon.

Chapter 3

    Well, I’m a fan of honesty so I’ll put this out there: chapter three involved a lot of skimming on my part.  Gallagher showed his true colors as an English teacher! While I see where he’s coming from, and agree with him for the most part; the day I teach a novel for any type of literary knowledge will likely be the day I croak.  In fact, if I ever assign a novel it will be just to read, maybe give me a summary to let me know you read it, but that’s it.

     In the beginning of Chapter three, Gallagher talks about a reading flow – being so lost in a book that the reader is oblivious to the world around him or her.  I can say, without a doubt, I have not experienced this in at least 15 years, if ever. (15 years ago, I was 7)  In fact the closest thing I’ve been to ‘lost in a book’ is ‘lost about the book’, i.e. having no idea what’s happening even though I’m reading the book.  I must admit, I became slightly envious of Gallagher’s ability to talk about how wonderful it is to read.  As the chapter continued, Gallagher enlightened me to the culprit of my hatred of reading: AR.  I started Accelerated Reader books when I was somewhere around third or fourth grade, and that was likely the last time I enjoyed what I was reading.  By middle school, we would gather in the library in groups of students who had read different books and help each other through the tests enough to get credit for the AR requirements in Language Arts class.  Since then, I have become a master of gaining an idea of the text from sparknotes, and discerning the difference in a summary and a review.  I read a young adult novel this past summer as part of my master’s course, and I’m pretty sure it’s the first book I’ve finished in at least six years (yes, that includes all of undergrad and half of high school).  I understand I may be an extreme case, but I am not the only case.  While I don’t think there’s a lot of hope for me, I see the value of enjoying to read.  With this, I think it’s more important for me to do my best to prevent readicide with my students.  Though it may seem hypocritical, I think it will be very important for me to encourage my students to pleasure read, or at the very least, not discourage them!  

Chapter 2

Gallagher titles his second chapter “Endangered Minds”, and I find this extremely appropriate to the product of today’s education system.  It has not been very long since I was the student in the secondary setting, and I am definitely a product of the crammed facts rather than thinking in school.  In response to some of the comments on my previous post, I have been in school (as a student) for the last 17 years of my life.  At least the last 8 of those years my “required reading” has been so significant that when I have any extra time, sitting and reading is not what I do; I’m the type that needs to get up and do something! I will say, I’ve tried to do book studies outside of school requirements, but that becomes too scheduled and also turns me off.  I do occasionally read news articles, blogs, road signs, and my Bible; but for the most part if I’m not doing school work, I’m probably not reading.

My sister, 5 years younger than me, has an even worse case of fact knowledge, evident by her striking lack of common sense.  She, like me, is doing well in her advanced math courses (in her junior year of high school she’s taking AP calculus) and is very intelligent in school; but neither one of us enjoyed language arts or English classes.  This is not the product of a poor home situation, as we come from a two parent home, where both parents are working, and we do not have to worry about where the next meal is coming from.  Both of us were taught to read at a very young age, and we grew up with many books in the house and would read at least one a day (at bedtime).  What happened?! Why do I hate to read, and she can barely think beyond the explicit instructions? Gallagher refers to Jane Healy’s Endangered Minds: Why Children Can’t Think – And What We Can Do About It.  Healy points out that students today are not allowed to sit and think.  They are rammed through a curriculum to see how fast we can move them along.  This is exactly what has happened, we had the proper foundation, but we have had so much forced reading that the pleasure in reading is gone along with the ability to think for ourselves.  We have become like Pavlov’s dogs… they became so accustomed to hearing a bell before they were fed steak that they would salivate at the sound of the bell.  In the same way, we have become so accustomed to having to read non pleasurable texts for school, that we dislike the idea of reading at all.  If my sister and I are this bad off coming from a background that included reading, I can't imagine how turned away from school students who are coming through without such a background must be.  It would be almost impossible to continue in education if reading was not just something the student didn’t enjoy, but something the student couldn’t do.

I appreciate the fact that Gallagher admits he is an English teacher, and does not claim all of his methods would work across the contents.  Because of this, I can respect his statement: We are not simply content-area teachers, we are all literacy teachers as well, and as such, it is a moral imperative that we provide a setting in which tons of reading occurs (p.58).   In response to my lack of literacy in education and this call from Gallagher, I have begun to rethink the use of literature in the science classroom.  I really like his idea of article of the week.  This could be instrumental in finding ways science is a part of everyday life, or developing the students’ ability to read and comprehend scientific articles.  I think it is important with assignments like this, for the teacher to stay deeply involved in the assignment.  The moment it becomes another thing to get done, the reading comes across as busy work and begins to contribute to the readicide rather than developing a more literate student.

intro and chapter 1

I feel like I should start with and explanation of my title.  I chose to name this blog "Readicide to Re(ad)birth".  Readicide is a word from Gallagher's title implying the mass killing of reading; the other word is supposed to be a combination of read and rebirth, signifying the bringing to life of reading.
As if you couldn't tell from the lack of real words in the title, I am not a pleasure reader.  I am a college graduate, I am a graduate student, I will be a teacher, I (think I) am a fully functioning member of society, and I don't enjoy reading.  I think it is alright to enjoy something more than reading, as long as I can read enough to be functional and productive.  With that said, I don't know that I would call "readicide" a problem, if a student is a natural reader, he or she will find that love no matter what the school does, and if a student is not inclined to read, he or she won't.  These are all opinions I held before reading any of Gallagher's book.
As a read, I came to the conclusion this book could very easily be a blog.  It does not seem to have much more fact than it does opinion, though I suppose the scientist in me wanted to see evidence over hypothesis.  A lot of the charts are hard to see and questionable as to how accurately they are portraying the information, but that's beside the point.  Gallagher seemed to talk in circles and really focused more on the "teaching to the test" problem than the "lack of love for reading" issue.  I do have to agree that he picked the bigger problem!  I am currently in a 6th grade life science class using the SEPUP book, where content is not as important as concepts and understanding.  As 6th graders, and middle schoolers, it is more important to gather interest enough to successfully make it through high school science than to have a ton of facts temporarily crammed in your head.  Unfortunately, the NCLB requires the crammed facts to pass the state and federal tests.  There is a serious disconnect when the textbooks are not aligning with the intended product of the standards, and unfortunately the teacher are caught in the middle.