Readicide

             In Readicide, Gallagher starts right away with shocking information and statistics. The book was gripping and hard to put down. Although, there was no actual dialogue with students, Gallagher managed to include student voice through paraphrasing and describing specific situations.

            It was astonishing to learn how the No Child Left Behind program was modeled after the deceitful Texas education system. Somehow it all made sense. It shouldn’t be surprising that students who are behind are falling even further behind under the current education system since it was modeled after a state that did its best to leave them out of the picture. Further, it is blatantly obvious that many of the schools in the area have given in and do not ask themselves the questions from chapter one. For example, when recently visiting a local high school with another class, after going to several classrooms the teachers were asked how they chose the decorations in their room. They spoke vigorously of how the motivational posters help the kids stay awake or inspire them, they commented upon the displayed student work and how it helps model and give students agency, they described the usefulness of dictionaries in the classroom, but there were no books anywhere to be seen in any classroom that I visited. This was disappointing, because one of the teachers I had visited used to be my high school teacher. I remember her having several shelves with novels and giving us plenty of voluntary reading time. I picked up Slaugherhouse Five off of one of those shelves; it later became one of my favorite books and now sits on my bookshelf.

            To be honest, Readicide reinforced many of the facts that often make me regret pursuing teaching as a career. I don’t want to have to follow a 122 page unit plan. I don’t want to chop-chop books for my students. I don’t want to have to fight with administration just to get the appropriate set of novels for my classroom. I don’t want to have to explain to parents why the bullshit they heard about education on TV from their favorite politician makes no sense. Maybe, if teachers out there didn’t have to do all of the above, then more than 2/3 of students would graduate high school.

On “reading flow”:

            I agree that the pleasure in reading can only be found when “flow” is achieved, when the reader has to “come up for air”,  but I do think that comprehension tools are useful for struggling readers or academic texts. However, I would find it very hard to ask my students to stop every paragraph and do something, even making them underline or think about a specific idea can hinder the reading flow. I think a summary question at the end of a large chunk of reading would be best to draw out the student’s reflection. I mean, do we really care what the main character wore to work in chapter one? If it is important to the comprehension of the theme, or maybe a symbol, or even if it helped us get a better understanding of the character – then yes, but if we are just asking our students to pick out pointless details soon they will lose the ability to point out the important ones.