Readicide by Kelly Gallagher

I love the definition the Kelly Gallagher gives for the word readicide (which he describes as a noun), “The systematic killing of the love of reading, often exacerbated by the inane, mind-numbing practices found in schools.”  What an amazingly, beautiful construction of words being used to describing a horrible concept that is being taught in schools.  I agree with Gallagher when he states that schools have become so obsessed with teaching to standardize tests, that our students are the ones who are beginning to suffer and eventually end up detesting reading for pleasure.

In Chapter Two, Gallagher talks about how many schools have novels and other longer work of writing to give teachers more time to teach their students to become more prepared for testing.    I can’t seem to wrap my mind around the point of teaching our students to be able to find information only for them to “regurgitate” on a literal level but they don’t understanding what they are regurgitate.   Yes, they can answer the prompt, but they do not understand the meaning behind the words.  In my opinion this is a definition of illiteracy.  I feel that it is our jobs as teachers to expose our students to a wide variety of both informational and literary texts while teaching to the standards, because it allows students to make deeper connections an actually use their brains.

I found Chapter Three to be interesting, because Gallagher quotes a study by McQuillan on reading tactic used in the classroom that I was exposed to during my early school years.  I can clearly remember in seventh grade where we would start my English class with SSR.  I thought that it was awesome that our teacher would allow us anywhere from ten to twenty minutes to read a book that we had chosen, that had nothing to do with the daily lessons, and how on Fridays we were given even more time to read for pleasure.  I remember in my class how every student took advantage of this because we loved have the freedom of choosing whatever we wanted to read, and were not being forced to read something boring and pointless.  We were actually that class that got mad when our time was up because we wanted to continue reading.

I had no idea that this was a sneaky little tactic that my teacher was using in order to make up better readers and writers, as well as improving our vocabulary skills.  Now that I think about it, we weren’t given points or any other incentive for reading, we were just allowed to choose a book and read, that was the only requirement.  Sometimes I wonder how my middle school teacher knew all of this stuff way back when, when I was in school.  He made reading fun and because of that I can now see how truly blessed I was to have such a knowledgeable teacher.  I hope that I can teach like he did and not subject my students to readicide.

A Response to the TPA Lesson Plan Format

At first glance the TPA Lesson Plan Format can seem a little overwhelming, especially when you are asked to create fifteen of them.  I have quite a bit of experience with these and feel quite comfortable when it comes to filling these out, but I wouldn’t consider myself an expert.  This format really makes you think, think again, and re-think as well as justify what you plan on teaching your students.  When it comes to the TPA you must be able to justify everything that you are teaching, as well as backing it up with research and theory that we have learned as teacher candidates.

When I was first introduced to this format, I thought that I would have to make an outline like this for every lesson plan that I taught.  Then reality set in and I realized I would forever be writing lesson plans and never actually teaching them if I did that.  With that being said, I think that having to do so may TPA’s throughout my time at Eastern has opened my mind when it comes to planning thoughtful, engaging, and purposeful lessons.  I really think that this is a useful tool for beginning teachers because it helps to organize our thoughts as well as to better prepare us for the materials that we are going to teach.

There are very few things that I find problematic with this lesson plan format.  The first and most obvious would have to be the detail that you have to put into it.  These cannot be done on the fly so to speak.  They take time and concentration, and I think that there are a lot of teacher candidates out there that want to try to do them in the shortest amount of time as possible, which defeats their purpose.  You have to go into them realizing that they will take time and you cannot wait to do them until the last minute.

Aside from that, I only have one other problem with the format, and that is the parent and community connections. When it comes to writing TPA’s for my Social Studies classes I find this to be very easy.  When studying historical material, everyone seems to have some connection with the past and it was easy to prompt my students to go home and talk with their parents about how certain events have affected their families.  However, I struggle with trying to come up with ways of answering this prompt with my English Language Arts lesson plans.  I find it boring and repetitive to say something like, “Students will be encourage to go home and talk about what they have read and learned in class today,” or something like, “Have students ask their parents if they remember reading the text we are studying in class.”  With fifteen lesson plans to write, hopefully I’ll find some creative ways to answer this prompt.

Cris Tovani's "I Read It, But I Don't Get It"

One of the goals that I had when the course first began was to learn techniques that would help me become a better teacher to those students who struggled with reading and comprehension.  After reading Cris Tovani’s I Read It, But I Don’t Get It, I now feel that I have several techniques that I can use in my classroom to help engage my students who are struggling.  Overall, I found this book to be one of the most useful textbooks I’ve come across during my education courses.  It was nice to get helpful tips from someone who actually struggled as a reader while in school and then went on to teach what she had created for other teachers to use in the classroom.

Where some of Tavoni’s examples from her classroom were quite innovative, I did find some of her stories to be very heartbreaking.  I’m not sure how she was able to keep her composure when other teachers asked her why it was their responsibility to teach their students reading when they were “technically” reading teachers.  I feel that all teachers are teachers of reading and need to do all in their power to help their students succeed.  No wonder Tavoni was encountering the students that she did in her classrooms, they didn’t have teachers that were willing to help lift them up and teach techniques to improve their comprehension.

Out of all the techniques that Tavoni discussed, I found the Double Entry Journals from the Appendix to highly intriguing.  I’ve been trying to figure out how to create those for my Unit Plan, but I’ve only ever heard of them, I’ve never seen them modeled or what kind of questions are asked in order to make them productive.  I also intend on using the section on “I Wonder Questions” to help keep the Double Entry Journals fresh, so the students don’t get bored with being asked the same prompt over and over again.

I would highly recommend this book to anyone interested in becoming a teacher, not matter what their endorsement area is.  I also feel that this book is a must have for anyone considering an endorsement in English and Social Studies.

What is Social Justice? Why is it important for our classrooms?

According to BusinessDictionary.com social justice is defined as, “ The fair and proper administration of laws conforming to the natural law that all persons, irrespective of ethnic origin, gender, possessions, race, religion, etc., are to be treated equality and without prejudice.”  With this definition in mind, which was quite a lot to digest, it helped me to better select an article to bring to class to discuss.  Most of the articles that I found seemed to have mixed feelings on the teaching of social justice within the classroom, but most seemed to favor the philosophy.

Since I am a Social Studies Major, I was very intrigued when I came across an article published in the Journal of Social Studies Research entitled “Social Justice in Social Studies Teacher Education: What is our message?” from the JSTOR Database. The authors of this article feel that teachers have a major impact of the success of their academic and their impact on society, and that teachers in the past have not done all that they could to prepare their students for the cultural diversity that they will encounter.

As I interpret this article, the authors feel that teaching our students social justice will only improve their learning and their lives outside of school as citizens in society.  The article then posed two questions that educators should be asking themselves when it comes to teaching social justice in the classroom: “How do teachers come to teach in this way?” and “What should we do in teacher education to support teacher candidates to these ends within current educational structures?”  There are multiple ways to answers these questions, but the authors felt that it all goes back to the training of current and future teachers.

As teachers we need to break out of the oppression of the dominate culture and teach our students the importance of being a cultural diverse society.  All students have the right to an equal education regardless of their cultural background, whether they are in the minority or the dominate culture.  The sooner that we begin to instill these values in our students the better our society and children will become.

Critical Pedagogy and Popular Culture in an Urban Secondary English Classroom - Jeff Duncan- Andrade and Ernest Morrell

First of all I would like to say how greatly I admire John Duncan- Andrade and Ernest Morrell in their commitment to academic excellence while applying the principles of critical pedagogy to their classrooms.  I truly believe that these individual set out to uplift their students who were from a school that had been established as being in a high poverty area, when there were only miles away from another high school that many would consider “rich.”  All of this information helped me to better understand their statement, “One of the core foundational philosophical principles to classroom pedagogy and practice included a belief that multiculturalism was more related to pedagogy than curriculum” (pg 185).

Because of this, I keep being returning to pages 189-191 on the section of Savage Inequalities in urban school under Pedagogical Practices. I personally love the move Stand and Deliver and can easily see why they would want to incorporate it into their curriculum.  What better way for our students to learn with material that they fell they can personally relate to?  However, reading this section made me sad to realize that there are schools out there that struggle with heating classrooms and have equipment that is so old that you have to know the tricks in order to get them to function or the lack of equipment in general.

I also want to applaud them for taking on the discussions about conditions seen in Savage Inequalities and Stand and Deliver.  It made me sad hearing how their students so easily related to the conditions from the text and movie concerning the administration and the teachers.  It would be hard to sit there and listen (and realize) that I was working in a building with colleagues that resembled characters from Stand and Deliver, because there were some that plainly put give teachers and bad name.

Overall, I felt that this section was very uplifting in what they encouraged their students to do.  How awesome is it that several of their students went on to urge city council members to adopt their initiative “Put Children First.”  They also talk about the “stinging backlash” of empowering their students because students began to take more initiative in their school, so when something wasn’t right they would get the bottom of the problem and fix it.  In reality are you really going to be upset if a student feels something is wrong, or are you going to be proud that you made them feel empowered enough to stand up for their own education?owever, reading this section maed