Readicide

Before I read the book, I liked the definition of Readicide that was on the back cover. It says, "Read-I-cide n: The systematic killing of the love of reading, often exacerbated by the inane, mind-numbing practices found in schools." What I liked most about this definition was the killing of the love of reading because I felt that was what happened when I was going through school. Books were more pushed on us and expectations were set for us. For example, from second to eighth grade, we were required to set an AR goal and had to read books and take tests on the computers about the books we read. By the end of a certain time period, we had to have accomplished that goal. I feel like this ruined reading for most students because they didn't read because they wanted to, they read because they had to. And if they were not meeting their goals, they would get punished. If a student gets punished for reading something they really don't want to read, this will just push them further from wanting to read. As I read more of Readicide, I understood more of what the definition meant by "mind-numbing practices found in schools." My favorite example of that was in chapter three when the author made a recipe for readicide called The Kill-a-Reader Casserole. The ingredients for this was: "Take one large novel. Dice into as many pieces as possible. Douse with sticky notes. Remove book from oven every five minutes and insert worksheets. Add more sticky notes. Baste until novel is unrecognizable, far beyond well done. Serve in choppy, bite-size chunks." This was awesome because, as humorous as it was, that was exactly how I felt when I read assigned readings in high school. We were required to have sticky notes all throughout our books with symbols we found or definitions of words we didn't know. Then during class we would talk about so many different things that I would get confused on what the book or play was actually about. Having already been a high school student, it was fun to read the different things Gallagher had to say about reading because most of what he talked about, I went through in school.

I Read It, but I Don't Get It

I think what hit home most for me from this book was the fake reading. I remember before I actually enjoyed reading, I would fake read all the time. I just didn't know people like teachers even struggled with it. I just kind of learned how to read and understand on my own. It definitely helped when I started reading things that actually were interesting to me. However, what didn't help was when I was still in elementary school, my teachers had us read to see how fast we could get through a paragraph and not base it off of understanding. Because of this, it became a competition between me and my friends. Who doesn't like healthy competition? But, when you get kids to think like that, they won't care about comprehension. All they will care about is who read it faster. I really liked how she had her students bring in their favorite books, and how she explained they would not be writing papers because of fake reading. I had many friends in high school who would ask me about assigned readings and what they were about so that they wouldn't have to actually read it. I even did it a few times before I learned to enjoy it. I really liked how relatable this book was, it was fun to read.

Blog Post #4

I really enjoyed the article "Assessing and Evaluating Students' Learning," there were lots of things I thought were interesting to read, but there were some things I did not quite agree with. A few things I liked were how they found that students did better with being tested on the details of the novel rather than being told to write a paper. I think writing papers are effective because the students learn the writing process, the "do's" and "don't's" with grammar and punctuation and all that jazz. However, when students are writing papers, it seems that those things are what they are taught to pay more attention to rather than what the novel was actually about. So when it comes to how students should be evaluated after reading a novel, I think they should be given a test rather than have them write a paper. Maybe not every time, because there are many different possibilities with how you can go about writing a paper depending on what you want the students to write about, and you can make it fun for them because although writing should be taken seriously, it should be fun to write about a novel, because everyone has their own opinions and it's fun to be able to see the student's minds at work that way. Another thing I liked from this article was that our own definition of what it means to learn literature will influence how we assess our students and how they will, in turn, learn literature. It leaves things up in the air with how we want to do things, and I really liked that. With today's technology, I like how one of the ways to assess was by an online responses with blogs, chats or journals. Everyone loves being online in one way, shape, or form, so who wouldn't like for their homework to be that way? The only downside I see to this is that if a student is not actually passionate or interested in what they are writing about or responding to in their post, they could easily just talk to their peers about whatever they wrote, and they could base their responses off of someone else and "BS" their posts. There were so many good things in this article, although there were a few things I disagreed with, they were small, I thoroughly enjoyed this article.