Teaching Reading / Promoting Literacy

I can certainly relate to the effects of readicide. Having been a lifelong reader, I’d be flummoxed when people would say, “Reading is boring,” or “You really don’t have TV?” Unlike most of my book-averse peers, I can look back and always had reading modeled for me by my parents. The library was a simple, no-cost (I learned quickly that late books came out of MY allowance), and rewarding place for my family to find some quality entertainment. I can remember wondering back then why my classmates didn’t like reading so much. Everything that I learned and loved came out of reading .

Back when I was in middle school, when reading starts to become “uncool”, I noticed that teachers who kept libraries in their classrooms and let us sign books out—either for required or recreational reading—had fewer complaints when it came time to do in-class reading. At the same time, I can remember my sixth grade teacher’s bookshelf. It was full of books. Problem was, most of those books were old, Newbury Award-winners. And even back then, I knew that what might be considered an award-winning book for a teen might not be considered enjoyable by that same teen. Other than those few blessed teachers that at least tried to keep books on hand (likely out of their own pocket), even my relatively well-off private school seemed to rarely ever restock the library or use anything other than the battered literary anthologies from 1994. Book deserts, it seems, are equal opportunity offenders.

I know that it isn’t fair to just blame the school’s lack of resources. I’ve recommended books to people that I just knew that they’d enjoy, talk to them weeks or months later, and they’d sheepishly say that they hadn’t read it. But lend the book to someone, and then they can’t put it down. Because of that, I really liked where Gallagher gave the example of how he got students interested in reading Who Killed My Daughter? It took getting the students interested, and then getting book into their hands to get them reading. It’s the extra step that we book lovers forget.

The parts of this reading that just made me shudder were the sections about how test prep is pushing reading out of the classroom. I think Gallagher summed up the illogic of this with the statement “in an attempt to raise reading scores, school districts are removing books from kids” (11). You wouldn’t attempt to raise math scores by handing students workbooks completely without context from the original concepts and terms. That wouldn’t be effective, even with the analytic, problem-solving nature of math. So why do schools use this approach with reading? I’ve observed PSSA reading prep classes and I think that if the student’s eyes glazed over any more in them they’d turn into Krispy Kreme donuts. It’s such a demoralizing environment, for students and teachers. Tell them that it was time to do SSR, well, that perked them up as if they’d just eaten a box of donuts.

Finally, I fully agree with Gallagher’s suggestion to do research to find out how much reading the students actually are doing in and out of the classroom. I’m planning to write a capstone paper that involves surveying adolescent reading in and out of the classroom, and think that it is not only a great way to get a feeling for where your students are with reading ability, but about them as individuals. Knowing what students read says a lot about them as people, not to mention what they find interesting.  

In short, I think that Gallagher has some great thoughts on what schools are doing wrong and what we as teachers can be doing right. I think that his main arguments center around all about modeling good reading practices and getting students access to books that they want to read, something that I see as effective.