Readicide

I am glad I am not the only one who can't stand it when teachers stop every two seconds to discuss the story. This is what Gallagher refers to as the "Tsunami". Students are unable to get lost in the book when the teacher is constantly stopping to teach. I like the "kill-a-reader casserole recipe Gallagher gives as well. If we teach books like this we will in fact ruin the sport of reading for all our students. A lot of what I read about I have been learning about in all the classes we've taken thus far but I was surprised what I read about AR books. I was surprised that Gallagher thinks this a horrible idea. I see this in all the elementary schools in my district. I did not realize these programs that offer extrinsic rewards are actually turning kids off from reading. This just goes to show how influential every decision we make, as teachers, really is.

In the first chapter Gallagher debates that there are too many mandated standardized tests. Educators are cramming material in one or two semesters for a State test, and kids merely memorize facts and information. There is no critical thinking. This can be exhausting and effect students as well as teachers. Both lose inspiration and ambition. Think about it... memorizing facts for a test as opposed to learning how to understand them. Just reflecting on it gives me anxiety. We as educators should choose how to evaluate our students and work from there.


Something else that Gallagher considers in the second chapter of the book that has me wondering. He argues "Kids without prior knowledge are at a disadvantage regardless of reading ability". So, if kids do not have prior knowledge/exposure to books... you can forget about them building on this knowledge at school. I am not sure how I feel about this. I have had my two daughters in the Chicago Public School system and when I think about my kids school, this is True. Many teachers (at CPS) are not motivated or prepared to build knowledge. Here is an example, I remember when my daughter was in kindergarten and I asked the teacher if she would send books home to read. She sent one book home a week. When I asked her for more she then sent two a week. It was pulling teeth to have a kindergarten teacher send books home to read. When I asked my daughter why she is not brining more books home from school she said "the teacher said no". Maybe the teacher did not have enough books in her classroom? Maybe the teacher felt it was the parents responsibility to provide books? This is a reality in certain schools, and it does not have to be.

I just love this book so far. It really hits home about a lot of issues that have been bothering me since I started taking my first education classes. All the teachers talk about, all the professors talk about it, but you never see these things put to action. Gallagher discusses right off the bat the issue of teaching to the test and how negatively that effects our students and their educations. We spend all our time trying to teach and teach and teach and hope that our students can pass all of their standardized tests, all the while we lose the opportunity to give them quality education, not just quantity. As teachers stuck in this unfortunate cycle, we witness our students pass or fail all of these tests and still not manage to comprehend or retain most of the content that has been taught. I was so excited for this book just from the description alone. Now I know what a great choice it was. I can't wait to read more about what Gallagher has to say! I feel like he won't just make my opininons on the subject feel validated, but that he'll possibly offer some hope and resolution for all of these issues. Here's to Readicide!

I generally enjoyed the first part of Readicide, but the tone sounded a little sensationalist. There was a quote I had trouble completely believing:

"...all adolescents go through key developmental brain stages that when they are not stretched in these periods of life their cognitive windows run the risk of shutting down..."

Gallagher suggests reading longer, challenging books to combat this. I wondered what exactly what part of the brain was this window, and was this "window" even true? This book doesn't describe what's actually going on in the brain. Gallagher just says there's some window of learning and if the kids miss it they will be less smart forever. It sounded kinda slippery slope to me, so I thought I'd ask an expert on child psychology, our cohort's former professor, Kelly Summers. She cleared up what this window was, and I'll share her response with this forum:

"Yes, indeed there is a kind of "use it or lose it period" of brain development. It's not that they will be "less smart" but it will make it harder to learn the same kind of things later in life. Here are a couple of more tangible examples of the "use it or lose it" principle:

1. Young children and adolescent's brains are much more primed to learn different languages. Their brains work faster and they have more hemispheric connections that haven't been pruned yet.

2. Younger people are much more likely to learn how to propel their body through space via flips and big jumps. This partially has to do with risk-taking but also has to do with their brains. For example, even though I really want to get big air on jumps when I ski, my brain just isn't cut out for it at this point in my life. I should have learned to do that when I was younger before that window shut.

As far as reading difficult books goes.....that seems like a stretch. Kids can't read difficult books if they can't read at all, ya know? The level of difficulty should be proportional to their acquired skill. Vygotsky would say just outside of that zone of proximal development. Just like a small kid isn't going to be fluent in Japanese right from the start, he would have to learn it incrementally but ultimately would learn it much faster and more thoroughly than an adult, you still wouldn't give that kid War and Peace written in Japanese before he could actually access that text."

So there is a window for children to learn, however it is more like a more conducive time for learning, due to extra hemispheric connections. Having kids read incrementally harder text makes way more sense than just reading hard stuff from the start. With that in mind, I'd agree with the author a lot more, and it sounds less sensationalized (although it still sounds like it was written a bit to entertain and sell!).

Linda, I agree with you about how we need to produce lifelong readers. I found it so interesting how the author gave examples of how students are not learning real world information because schools are just teaching to the tests. I know finding a good balance will be tough but we will figure it out!

I also think it is great that you are going to incorporate supplement readings for your students. That will give students multiple points of view to compare and contrast. Do your students use any reading reading strategies likes the ones we have been doing in class? If they do, which ones do they use?

Readicide, Final Thoughts.

Kelly Gallagher is a high school teacher in California. He begins his book by providing a definition of the term readicide: the systematic killing of the love of reading, often exacerbated by the inane, mind-numbing practices found in schools. In the introduction, he also asserts that schools value the development of test-takers more than they value the development of readers and that schools are limiting authentic reading experiences.

Some things that Gallagher points out that seriously provide food for thought are that:

1. The emphasis we place on multiple choice tests prep makes sure that our struggling students continue to be struggling students.

2. By focusing on test prep, we sacrifice deep, rich teaching and thus reduce student motivation

3. Schools across the country are actually taking books away from kids (removing novels from the curriculum) to focus more on test prep.

Throughout the rest of the book, Gallagher advocates for providing a 50/50 approach to reading instruction. He states that 50% of the time students spend reading should be on pleasure reading, focusing on teaching students to discover "reading flow", that time where we get lost in reading because the book/story is so good. The other 50% of the time should be academic reading, in which teachers aren't over teaching with a million sticky notes, 200-page teaching guides for novels and stopping children every ten minutes to analyze their processing. Instead, teachers need to learn to frame the text, provide purpose for reading and let students try reading big chunks on their own. Then teachers should do what he calls a “close reading”, which is an excerpt from the assigned reading that is then examined together in class, this might be one or two pages where students can really hone in on the purpose that the teacher provided during the initial framing.

Gallagher also provides a reading list of books that his most reluctant readers can't wait to dig into (geared mostly for middle/high school readers). In the appendices, there are also "One Pagers" which is a way to provide structure and purpose for independent reading without overwhelming the students and making reading too much of a chore.

Overall, I would give this book a 5 out of 5 stars. I came away from it with some ideas for what I can change in how I would approach reading instruction with my future career. I also believe that, any upper elementary or middle school teacher who reads this book would find some insight in it as well.

Readicide, in my opinion, was a fabulous book. I’ve had a lot of thoughts, ideas, and strong opinions when it comes to reading curriculums in schools and what they are doing to students and their feelings about reading. Everyone has a different opinion, we read too much, too little. We need to read more of this, or more of that! What Gallagher talks about in his book is the act of Readicide, what it does, and how we can try and stop it and make changes for the better. He kicks off the book by talking about how the education system emphasizes the importance of reading scores over the importance of the act of learning to read itself. In doing this, you’re basically ensuring that students will not like to read and not be good readers. Another point he made that hit home was that when we start encouraging more actual reading in school, we need to make sure students are getting what Gallagher calls an “authentic” reading experience. What he means by this is students need to be exposed to a variety of texts from fiction to nonfiction and beyond! When students are exposed to an abundance of topics and styles, they grow as readers. A final thing that really hit home for me is that there is truly a happy balance between over teaching and under teaching the text. You don’t want to drop a new text on a student’s lap and leave them to make their way through it alone with little to no guidance, but you also don’t want to take a book and pick it apart into hundreds of mini lessons. You want to introduce, but not over do; guide, but not suffocate. It’s a hard balance to achieve, but when you hit that point it leads to maximum learning opportunities for your students. In my own classroom I’d love to have a focus on the development of reading instead of simply the act of reading. I’d have to make sure I was extra conscious of student’s efforts, struggles, triumphs, and more as I guide them through the reading process. I would also like to make sure that students understand that while they are in school and learning certain amounts of things is expected, that they are reading to learn, not simply to check of criteria met. Finally, I want to bring back sustained reading! Gallagher talks about how the elimination of silent sustained reading has led to the butchering of student’s love of reading. Giving students the opportunity to silently read a book of their choosing for more than ten minutes a day is what helps them build new background knowledge that they can apply to academic texts later on down the road. I don’t really have any challenge points for Gallagher. I agreed with basically everything he said in the book. It was wonderful to read and I hope I can apply what I’ve learned in my own classroom soon!