Readicide

I want to start off by saying I completely agree that schools are killing the love of reading because of the practices in place. I used to hate reading the required readings in school. They were boring, or stupid, or over analyzed and it sucked. I used to completely skim the required reading, for homework purposes, and then read my own book. I always had the problem that my own book though was not in the school system and therefore I couldn’t get credit for reading it in my class. I noticed many students in my class though never did any of the readings for the in-class text and was always ‘winging-it’ with in-class discussions and homework. Also, everyone always hated SR – silent reading. There were only a few of us that actually enjoyed the silent reading time, where we were able to read our own books in the classroom.

I think one of the biggest problems with the required readings within the class was that every time we did one, it was for the same purpose. Follow the characters, follow the plot, summarize, follow the timeline, and write a book report. We did that all through middle school and then even into high school. Constantly spitting out summaries of either what we read or the entire book. The same purpose over and over again throughout the many years in grade school.

As students get older, they need a better purpose to motivate them to do things. The purpose should not stay the same throughout the years, it should get more complex, more individual and provide an authentic reading experience. We as teachers need to remember to relate the students to the reading. We want them to stop thinking, “oh we are reading another book and summarizing it?” Also, as much as I love the books I read in middle school and high school, they are starting to become less relatable to the newer generations. For example, The Outsiders was what I read in seventh grade and was considered a “diverse” book because it was about a different era. Granted, I enjoyed it, it was an interesting book for me, however, today's generations are not going to relate to the boys in that book anymore and are not going to understand some of the things they do or say in that book. To teach that book today, there would have to be a ton of scaffolding to go before it and maybe even a history lesson for kids to understand how things were back then. So we have to make sure we are updating our curriculum and making sure that what we are using in our class is easily relatable to the ‘day and age’ we are in. It is the same aspect with the development of technology in the classroom and how that is updated almost every year or so, we need to be doing the same with our curriculum and readings especially to keep up with the generations.

The point Gallagher makes about the fact that schools are valuing the development of test-takers more than readers, or anything else for that matter, I completely agree with as well. I know by now everyone knows about how controversial the subject of schools teaching to the test is, and how people are for and against it and everywhere in-between. For Gallagher to bring up that point was interesting to me to see how he specified it as one of the causes of readicide. Don’t get me wrong, I see that it can be a cause for readicide, but at the same time I slightly disagree. This is where I believe the teacher over-teaching the book could play a bigger role than the teaching to the test aspect. We have to teach to the test and the standards with everything we do, it is just up to us as teachers to make sure our curriculum pertains to our students and is still giving students purpose, connections, and motivation.