Readicide: Is our children learning?

My prevailing mood after reading chapters one and two of Readicide is dismal. Kelly Gallagher provides, if not overloads, his readers with a mountain of statistics about current [well, sort of] reading levels and habits. While these statistics are not really full of sunshine and rainbows, I would argue that Gallagher describes many valid and accurate observations and provides his readers with numerous ideas and concepts to begin reversing the reading habits and levels of our students. I suppose I will begin this blog post by talking about some of the interesting observations Gallagher mentioned and my personal reactions/interpretation of them. Then, I will discuss some of the suggestions Gallagher made in chapter two.

I would like to start with this quote: "Want to extinguish an adolescent's curiosity? Cover as much material as possible" (Gallagher 10). Gallagher mentions how assigning texts such as Dickens and Fitzgerald only kill the curiosity of the students. This was exactly my experience in high school and has become a longstanding joke between me and my 10th grade English teacher. I didn't read either of the Dickens texts that were required for her class, nor did I read the Shakespeare texts; they simply did not interest me. Instead, I would bring books that were physically smaller in size and conceal them inside the massive, intimidating Dickens books. On the whole, I would consider myself an avid reader and a good student. While I didn't do the required reading, I read the Sparknotes (gasp), participated in class successfully, and managed to pull an A in the class. I think that some "classics" should be included in the curriculum, but it most definitely should not be a schedule of classic after classic. Like Gallagher stated, it will simply "extinguish an adolescent's curiosity"; I have absolutely zero interest in anything by Dickens now. If we, as teachers, balanced the classic novels with more modern/interesting/relevant novels, our students would be much more intrigued and prompted to read more.

A few times in these chapters, Gallagher elaborates on how in some schools, they are removing the novel entirely. This seems asinine to me....we want to increase the literacy of our students, so let's remove all of the novels. Um, how about no? That is the most counter-intuitive idea I've ever heard. Gallagher quotes another text saying, "It is not simply a matter of the number of words unheard and unlearned. When words are not heard, concepts are not learned. When syntactic forms are never encountered, there is less knowledge about the relationship of events in a story. When story forms are never known, there is less ability to infer and predict. When cultural traditions ant the feelings of others are never experienced, there is less understanding of what other people feel." (Gallagher 32, Wolf 102) This is a long way of simply saying that if students are not reading, there is no feasible way that they are learning. If this is going to be a concept that many schools adopt, I would much rather see teachers only teaching classics. I just want my students reading books.  Gallagher cites two other sources with statistics about what happens when students simply read. He summarizes, "poor readers tended to have greater gains in vocabulary with 15 minutes of reading and they had better gains on reading comprehension with 40 minutes of reading" (Wu and Samuels 2, Gallagher 42) and that, "students who read a novel with many unique words actually learned the meaning of those words from context clues only" (Krashen 10, Gallagher 43). With statistics like these, I do not understand why every teacher across the nation isn't offering self-selected reading [SSR] times, or free voluntary reading [FVR]. As a student with a bunch of after-school responsibilities, I would have killed for 20 minutes of free reading time during the school day.
One thing I found particularly interesting in these two chapters was Gallagher's findings between his students in California and the students he interacted with in Wyoming. On one of the standardized tests, Gallagher noted that the title of one of the reading sections was "The Farrier". Upon polling his 12th grade classes in southern California [Anaheim], he came to realize that not a single student knew that a farrier was someone who puts shoes on horses. He asked this same question to the students in Wyoming and almost every student knew the meaning. From this, he inferred that where one grows up and what one is exposed to, impacts their cultural knowledge. I think that, in the back of my head, I knew this, but I've never really thought about it. Gallagher believes that, "What the reader brings to the page is often more important than the ability to read the words on the page" (Gallagher 33). I would completely agree. I think that we, as teachers, should definitely include literature that is of interest to our students. But I also believe that we should expand our students' cultural knowledge base. I love Gallagher's concept of an article a week is a wonderful one. Not only are the students getting good experience reading nonfiction news articles rather than the typical novel, short story, or poem; but, they are also expanding on their cultural knowledge base. Beyond this concept, I believe that SSR and FVR time should be more prominent in all English classes. While I was reading these two chapters, I noted how successful Gallagher was in bringing a library to his students. I had a thought that I will most probably employ in my classroom: I would like to devote a bulletin board to recommended readings. One of my favorite parts about going to Barnes and Noble is seeing what the staff picks are and why. I think that having a bulletin board where I post my weekly recommendation and leave a large area open for students to post their own recommendations/descriptions would be ideal for spreading the love/desire to read interesting and engaging novels. "Children grow into the intellectual life of those around them"....let's be the intellectual life surrounding our students! (Vygotsky 88, Gallagher 44)