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.