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.