Readacide Gallagher Chp 1 Excerpt

         The excerpt had a huge list of “hard talk” questions. These questions are all focused on classrooms and how reading is taught. These questions also suggest that if we don't do something about reading and how it is taught, we will leave our childrens' learning behind. One included feature in this excerpt is a chart of the benefits of “beating the odds” schools. This chart is a list of the mundane performance of “typical schools” and “beating the odds schools”. One study by Langer found that schools that rely solely on one dominant approach only are unlikely to rise to the level of an effective school.

         This excerpt was meant to inspire thought provoking thinking in the way we teach reading. I found it to be dull besides the questions on the sheet. The chart of the benefits of “beating the odds” schools was a classic approach to inspire their motives. I understand that hard hitting questions and change help, however, charts like this prove nothing for me. The connection I made was with questions like “Why is it that the higher the grade level, the higher the chances that students are turned off to reading?”. This question made a personal connection with me, as I am going into highschool biology teaching. I need to know what the correlations are between age and reading so that I can combat it. I also liked the question “are our students doing enough academic reading?” This is true especially with Facebook and many other social media networking sites. Most of the reading kids do is selecting their next songs, searching the internet, and talking to friends on Facebook. I believe one way to combat this is by introducing students to short news stories that interest them. Kids already love updates on their friends, and all kids have favorite subjects and hobbies. If they can get access to quick news updates on their favorite things it will open them up to reading more news and stories about subjects that are not so pertinent to them. Therefore, my job will be to not only find these news articles for them, but also to find out what areas they find interesting.