Prompt: My response to Readicide
WOW! So Chapter 2 was long but full of information. Gallagher discusses how his students who were ninth graders did not know who the Vice President of the United States was in 2007 and his 12th graders did not know who al Qaeda was after the U.S. being in war for almost 5 years.
I discussed this Chapter with a former teacher who is an avid reader and he mentioned knowing "too many" kids who did not know anything about our government and our society. He told me similar situations that he had in the classroom and he discussed all the people he knew that did not read books at all for fun. He said that too many people use the excuse that they do not have time to read. As I finished my discussion about Readicide with this man I began to feel sad.
Before now I have not ever read for fun but I know who the VP is and about the war in Iraq. So where is the gap? Gallagher talked about different students having different experiences growing up. He discussed how students in Wyoming knew what a farrier was but students in California did not recognize the word. The two sets of students had different prior knowledge growing up in different states.
Also Gallagher discusses that lower socioeconomic students have less access to books and to extensive vocabulary. Because of this teachers need to give the students as much access to BOOKS as possible.
I discussed in class the other day how at my high school I will be student teaching at soon, they are pulling students out of electives and social studies in order to give them more practice at math so they can pass a standardized test. This is so unfortunate and leads to the problem of our students not knowing who al Qaeda is or who the VP of the U.S. is!!
I like the idea of having an Article of the Week even if it doesn't link to the content. Chapter 2 was extremely helpful to me because I am going to do my Action Research project on reading comprehension by having students work with business articles throughout the week. I am excited about being able to bring in what is going on in the world around us and our students! I hope that I will find by giving the students different strategies in reading they will in turn begin to enjoy reading and be interested in what is going on in the real world!!
I agree with you that we as teachers need to give our students as much access to books as possible. I plan on having in my room a small bookshelf with all my books that Ive collected about art. Hopefully a few kids will be interested and read them for fun. And as I 've said the article of the week is a great idea. There are always important things going on in the business world. Take Toyota for example. Im sure there is plenty being written about them. You can take the articles and examine how the situation affects the students, and it's a great way to incorporate real-world application.
ReplyDeleteCasie, I can understand the sadness that you talk about when discussing how many students do not know important facts like the VP or what al Qaeda is. I have also discussed the ideas in Readicide with some of my teacher friends who all seem very matter of fact about how their students not enjoying reading. It is all too common that these teachers dsicuss how these students have no knowledge of real life facts such as these. Many teachers discuss how their students are unlikely to know genral facts that are not "on the test". I believe that it is important that we find ways to make the content of our classes more applicable to real life and that we better prepare them for the real world!
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