the late post

As with every chapter in this book, I find that i agree with a lot of the points that Gallagher is making. There are some points that I have a problem with as well however. I especially like the part about the standards: that the sheer overwhelming abundance of standards inhibits the students from learning. This is something that I have noticed many teachers are aware of. There are often so many standards and questions that are associated with those standards that understanding the content becomes difficult. Not only is it difficult for the students to learn, it is also difficult for the teacher to teach. We want these children to learn the content but with so many standards it is hard.
I understand the point that he is trying to make when he says that we over analyze books and make them boring. However, I think that he overestimates the importance and existence of the "flow". There are many kids, who is we did not stop and have them analyze the reading, would not participate. While getting into the zone of reading is important and fun, it does not work for every student. I think that some analyzation is called for in the class because there are students that need to have the content broken down. The slow readers and the ones that are not developmentally on the same level as the good readers need to have the book broken down in my opinion.

Response to Readicide: What is the message? What is your reaction? What are your connections to school experiences? What are ways you now understand will help students read more effectively in your discipline?

When I read the first chapter of Readicide I think that it depressed me more than anything. I agree wholeheartedly with what the author is saying and I don't see any way that this trend is going to change. I think that with every age group there are now less and less readers. While this can be attributed to the parents, laziness of the child, and other more entertaining media outlets, it is obvious that there is a problem in our schools. Schools should be a place that encourage reading any way that they can but they have gotten away from this with every new year and new policy change. The authors message of the dangers of teaching to the test is an important one and I think that all new teachers should listen to it.

I think that we as teachers all saw a little of this phenomenon in our student teaching. Trying to get the students to read is akin to pulling teeth and what they do read they often do not comprehend. I believe that the fostering of enjoying reading has to be instilled at a very young age and continued through out a student's development. However, the educational system seems more interested in statistics than it does the well being of the students that it educates. The test score is more important than the content that went into it and reading gets pushed to the side. I think that one of the best ways to get students to read is to give them choices in the decision. Arbitrarily assigning one text to the whole class never seems to go off smoothly and I believe that if we just gave the kids a chance to choose for themselves they would be more interested in reading. they may only have two or three choices to pick from but at least they have a hand in picking what they want to do. the choices can be educational and on the topic of what we are teaching.

January 14: Blog 1

I think that content literacy is an important issue for us as future teachers to focus on. However, I believe that before we can look too deep into the literacy problems in our specific content areas we must look at our student's basic literacy deficiencies. I think that there is a serious problem with the way in which the children read and write. Before we begin to look at the task of teaching our students to be competent in the literacy of the content areas, I believe that these general deficiencies must be attended to.
I suppose that my perception is that students are already going to enter the classroom with literacy problems and correcting this is going to be one of our main tasks. Yes, I do believe that content literacy is very important; I believe that it can be taught. However, I also believe that the students need to be taught at a basic literacy level by us as well. I do not have the answers to this problem; all I know is that during student teaching I saw severe flaws in the writing and reading skills of the students on a very broad scale. Teaching them to read and write in the content is important but it is more than a little pointless if we don't also emphasize the basic skills that make for good literacy habits. In my experience, the literary content of history can be rather boring and useless if you are not taught how to use it. Looking just at the important facts and dates and not reading and analyzing deeper into the text are often skills that students lack in their history content literacy.

From a social studies viewpoint, I think that the most effective reading occurs when the student can not only understand (and remember) the dates, names, and periods of the unit, but also the deeper concepts of what they are reading. I think that those in the history fields get to focus on the facts and figures while failing to show students the how and the why of history. Effective student readers should be able to answer two questions after they read something in the history field: So what? and Who cares? These two questions are more important to me than memorizing any date or name and spitting them back out. Students should be able to read a history text and tell the teacher why it is important, not just who was in it and at what time it took place. I realize that in the current system of teaching to high-stakes testing and the end of course exams the students are required to know these facts, but I do not see why history teachers can't teach them to analyze what they read in the field as well. I think that students get turned away from history because we do not show them how to understand what they are reading.