Responding to Kelly Gallagher's "Readicide"

            The words written in Kelly Gallagher’s Readicide express some major concerns I have about my future students and my future career as an educator.  Gallagher tackles issues such as the ways our students test and what makes a good test, the learning gap between students, early learners not having acquired the appropriate amount of diction required to get a good start in their education, and students not having proper access to authentic reading tools.  The aforementioned are just a few of the problems which build up to the definition of readicide that Gallagher talks about in his book.

            When I first began to learn about what it means to be a teacher – that is to say when I first began taking classes on being an educator – I had made up my mind about multiple choice questions and how we place too much emphasis on “teaching to the test.”  I was under the impression that to teach to a test standard took students away from authentic learning and reading and pushed students down the path of reluctant reading.  While I still hold onto this belief, Readicide posed an opinion from a teacher’s perspective that questioned my resolve about “teaching to the test.”  It is not about “teaching to the test” or the use of multiple choice questions to assess your student’s learning but rather the challenge comes from teaching to a “shallow” test rather than an authentic test.  The example of the shallow test placed more emphasis on remedial and trivial questions and the various responses teachers gained from their student’s; however, it is possible to create or manufacture multiple response questions with the inevitability of asking the authentic questions and not the mundane.

            In chapter two, in the section “A Danger of Word Poverty,” I had a moment where this particular section hit a little close to home.  Although I am a well-rounded reader today, growing up in a small rural community, known for harvesting wheat and barley, with high school graduating classes comprised of 30 students, surprise to say I was anything but “well-rounded” in terms of my vocabulary.  Today, at the stroke of a key or click of a mouse, students have access to worlds of knowledge and information that in my early education I never even dreamt about.  How then is it possible for todays’ early learners to have this much information and very little access to it?  Poverty and low income houses does have an impact to be certain; however, as educators, is it not part of our job to find ways around these vocabulary blocks and bring our students access to a wellspring of knowledge that comes with being an English language arts teacher?

            Fighting readicide is a difficult task for every English language arts teacher at any level of education.  Promoting healthy and authentic reading is something that we should all impose on our students and it is my goal to provide my students with the best learning I can muster.