“Readocide” Review

There were a lot of good topics and points that Kelly Gallagher pointed out in his book “Readocide”. However, as a whole I felt like the book was very common sense based for those of us who have observed or taught reading and ELA. Even present day students currently in an ELA or reading class would read this book and say, well yeah….I will point out that I like seeing what I have thought over and over again in written form. The strategies and suggestions Gallagher makes for teachers teaching reading are excellent and like “I Read It but I don’t Get It”, the provided worksheets and access tools to use in the classroom are awesome ammunition to add to the artillery case as a teacher. I agree that testing is a driving force in how we teach our students now days. In fact we are overemphasizing the importance of “The Test” instead of emphasizing the importance of learning and developing our students into what Gallagher calls “expert citizens” with important life skills. These life skills include creativity, ethics, dedication, handwork, fairness, honesty, flexibility, common sense, teamwork, and life long learner drive. I think that these are all great skills to have but it leaves out important 21st century skills in both cognitive and conative aspects. There needs to be emphasis on self control and self understanding. Teamwork and communication between others and being aware of how one’s voice affects the feelings and views of others is also very important for our students to understand and essentially grow into in order to be an “expert citizen”. Problem solving and deeper discussion based thinking is also very important in terms of being an “expert citizen”, I would think. Teaching to the test essentially accounts for content cut of two-thirds of the information a student receives according to Gallagher. That's over half of the content being thrown away. The book suggests two reasons as to why developing “test-takers” is degrading and eating our students reading skills to be literally non-existent. The first, curriculum's are being based more on students abilities to successfully take multiple choice questioned tests, thus the teaching and learning structure becomes very shallow and eliminates content as mentioned above, The second, emphasizing multiple choice only solidifies the fact that students who are already struggling will only continue to struggle and fall even further behind. When we emphasize multiple choice in our learning and teach to test successfully we lose skills and only build memorization skills. Essentially we create fact  regurgitating robots for students. Not successful thinkers, problem solvers, and citizens. The other topic that caught my attention in the book was the talk of SSR or silent sustained reading. Gallagher suggests that and recommends this to help build reading skills and reading capacity. However, I strongly disagree. Since discussing the issue of reading among students and the types of readers we have, forcing them to read silently can present a multitude of problems. With students who have comprehension issues or are reluctant readers, they won't read, and if they do they won’t comprehend a damn thing they have read. We have a “word poverty issue” which I agree with in the sense that our students vocabulary and word knowledge is very limited and is only getting worse because we have a reading issue among schools due to, teaching to test. Using reading as something students may do optionally at the end of an assignment or task completion is a starting point for getting our students to read more, and to read independently. This Free Voluntary Reading is a choice and along with the choice of reading the students need to be able to choose their materials. I thought that the section of the book that listed the ingredients to building a reader were both basic but fairly on point and accurate in theory. The reading material must be something interesting to them.They must have time in school to read.They must have a comfortable place to read their material.
All of these components should and could help encourage reading IF we as teacher can eliminate all the other external distractions that seem more appealing to students than reading does. This includes internet, cell phone, peers, sketching, and other homework that is due next period… We need to teach students to both read and test. Teachers need to teach their students to actively read and read for comprehension in addition to encourage students to read for leisure which is very difficult with all of the technology we have today. I think that when using literature in class teachers need to engage student’s background knowledge and prepare them for the reading they are going to be engaged in so that they don’t feel blind sided or lost and give up before they even start. This book was saying what we all know is happening I feel… A good read, but one of common sense.