Readicide Response

I enjoyed this book and will most likely look to it more as I teach my students in order to bring interest back into reading. I had always felt the mood and effects of this phenomena Gallagher calls "Readicide" but I never could figure out why this was happening to my fellow students and I. It was nice to have Gallagher point out some factors that have caused this "Readicide" such as valuing test takers over development of readers, limiting authentic reading experiences, overteaching books, and underteaching books. In my experience I have had had both ends of the spectrum from under to overteaching of literature. One memory I have is from ninth grade learning about To Kill a Mockingbird. My teacher loved this book so much and as a result we spent about two months on the book analyzing everything about it. When Gallagher said the quote "Would you stay in a movie theater if the projectionist stopped the film 22 times", I could definitely relate (61). Despite spending so much time on the book, I now remember very little about the book except for the terrible memories of the unit never ending.
I found it intriguing, yet not too surprising, that students who read the most for fun scored highest on standardized tests (35). When I was in high school, reading for fun never seemed to be emphasized and we never had any sort of SSR reading time in place in any of the classes. I believe that as a English teacher, I will try my best to incorporate time into my classes to allow students to read their own selected books that are interesting to them. I also hope to over time accumulate many books to have in my class for my students so that I can, as Gallagher put it, "bring the library to the students" (52).
I also enjoyed the idea of augmenting books with authentic, real world text (46). As a Social Studies major, I found this to be an awesome idea because not only can students improve their reading but they can become more informed about events happening in their town, country, and world.Another helpful tip from the book was the idea of "framing" the text by providing a purpose for the reading and providing students with the necessary information to be able to understand the reading (96).