Readicide by Kelly Gallagher

-
In chapter two of Readicide, Kelly Gallagher discusses the fact that schools are focusing less on providing students with literature and more on providing them with test preparation. Gallagher focuses on the idea that students are able to regurgitate and recite what they read on a surface level, but never deeper than that. Her suggestion for secondary English teachers to combat this lack of comprehension and removal of critical texts is to advocate for your students' need to read novels. Reading novels that they are interested in is essential to students' ability to comprehend, analyze, and write about texts. Gallagher says "teachers have a duty to challenge students with complex novels and longer works. We are English teachers, not English assigners, and as such, we are paid to get in our classroom and present texts that stretch our students' thinking" (57).  This particular quote really stuck with me. Schools that eliminate novels from the classroom in order to make room and time for test taking strategies are schools that place value on the political aspects of public education, rather than cultivating the best environment for students to thrive. Schools that praise test-taking strategies and reading to repeat as necessary skills for students to have are schools that are factories. They are not schools that care about providing students with the best, most wholesome education. They are schools that care about high test scores and the way their students look on paper.  As an English teacher, I will strive to introduce my students to literature that broadens their horizons and brings them new experiences. I will not assign reading purely because it is functional or because it is an easy read. I will assign reading because it has something important to offer my students.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Blog POEst

-
For today’s blog post, I read Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart.” The short story is about an insane man’s confession of murdering an old man whom he cared for. Although it is about murder, the story is rather light in subject compared to other Poe stories. I think it would be an excellent story to incorporate in a junior or senior English class. I would use this short, engaging story to practice comprehension skills with reading. In I Read it, But I Don’t Get It, Cris Tovani discussed the difficulty of introducing a text with atypical words to the average high school student, and especially those that are conditioned “fake readers.” As most Poe, or anything written around the time period, there are quite a few unfamiliar words in the story. In an attempt to make this story actually understandable, rather than just readable, I would introduce a vocabulary sheet before reading. I would make sure that this came across as helpful, not condescending, as vocab sheets...
Read more

Common Core Standards

-
While looking through the English Language Arts Common Core Standards, I was reminded that the standards are a guideline for teachers. They provide a framework for the education that teachers should aim to provide for students. The Common Core Standards have a lot of negative attention surrounding them, seemingly from parents of school-aged children. I frequently hear and see parents express their frustration with Common Core by saying things like “what is wrong with the way we learned?” I anticipate that this sort of attitude will still be an issue when I am teaching, so it will be important to me to integrate and inform parents about my curriculum choices. I will structure my class around the Common Core Standards with the goal of providing the most well-rounded education I am able to provide. I hope that parents and guardians of my future students will, by the end of the year, have an understanding of my goals for the year and ways in which they align with Commo...
Read more

Book Talk

-
Image
American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang Overview: American Born Chinese is a graphic novel surrounding the story of Jin Wang, a Chinese-American boy struggling to fit in at his new school. The book has three different main stories within it. Jin Wang’s story is the primary one. There is also the story of The Monkey King and the story of Danny and Chin-Kee. All of the stories in the book carry the central idea that these individuals must fulfill their destinies while remaining true to themselves and not conforming to their (sometimes harsh) peers and communities. Biography: Gene Luen Yang was born in California. His parents were both from Taiwan, though his mother spent some of her childhood in Hong Kong. His parents emigrated to America and met at San Jose State University. When he was younger, Yang wanted to be an animator for Disney. He attended the University of California, Berkeley where he majored in computer science and minored in creative writ...
Read more