Gallagher's "Readicide"

That is a good book which is opened with expectation and closed with profit.

–Amos Bronson Alcott

This book is amazing! Filled with many great ideas and techniques to keep students reading. I think with the deluge of technology in students’ lives, there are less and less opportunities to read. I hope in my classroom I have time available for my students to enjoy free-reading, without looking like a slacker of a teacher. To me, the most important part of learning is reading, and then the discussion of reading.

On page 40 of Readicide, Gallagher states, “Administrators who remove novels from the curriculum do not understand that when we teach the standards through complex novels, the benefits to students are twofold: they not only learn the standards but also develop the deepest regions of their brains.” To better serve our students we should make sure there is ample time to delve deep into a great novel.

According to To Read or Not to Read (National Endowment for the Arts 2009), Americans are reading less:

*Among seventeen-year-olds, the percentage of nonreaders has more than doubled over a twenty-year period, from 9 percent in 1984 to 19 percent in 2004.

*On average, Americans ages fifteen to twenty-four spend almost two hours a day watching television, and only seven minutes of their leisure time on reading.

           
I can only imagine that these statistics have dropped even further, ten years later. I realize that technology is an awesome tool for learning, however, it has taken away the passion for reading books, for some people.

As teachers, I believe we need to instill the importance of reading for our students. I don’t want to see children miss out on knowing the pleasure of reading a great novel; that would be a great loss.

Some teachers find that they do not have enough copies of a novel for students to take home and read, therefore the students have to do all of their reading in the classroom. Kelly Gallagher believes that is a shame because if students only read at school, they will not learn how to be life-long readers. The author insists that we should not sit back and let that happen. “A system that does not provide books for students to take home to read is an immoral system, and teachers who quietly resign themselves to these systems contribute to the problem” (46).

Teachers need to aid in the growth of literacy skills. It is the foundation for doing well in school, communication with others, developing independence and working in the real world.

To help a student with reading complex texts, Gallagher suggests “framing the text.”
Page 96:
           
* A preview of the final exam essay question so as to provide a very specific purpose for the novel.
            
* Some vocabulary preview to help them with the archaic language.
          
* A discussion of the historical context of the story. An explanation of how the time in which it was
            written (the Victorian Age) contributes to the meaning of the work.

* Background on the author and what he was trying to accomplish with this work.

* An anticipation guide to help students begin recognizing the universal truths found in the novel.

*   A discussion on why we are reading this book and the value it offers to the modern reader.