Readicide: How to Implement the Love of Reading Back Into Our Classrooms.

I simply love the definition of readicide. It is the systematic killing of the love of reading, often exacerbated by the inane, mind-numbing practice found in schools. Back in my days as a middle/high school student, I found myself hating reading. The text were too boring, and at an early stage of school I figured all I needed to do was listen to the lectures and I will ace the test. This is because teachers have felt the need to teach to the test so that they seem like they are doing an accurate job. I was never pushed to read for the love of it. That is what is still happening in our schools today. Students are learning at an early age that they despise any reading at all. We must save our schools and students from this habit because if we continue down this path we will have illiterate students who rely on others for the answers.

Kelly Gallagher believes that a way to get our students to love reading is by giving them interesting materials. I agree full heartedly that this will work because of my own personal experience. It wasn’t until senior year of high school that I became a reader. It was all thanks to The Great Gatsby. I don’t know what it was about the book that got me hooked onto reading. I found the 1920s fascinating. I love the aspect of new women, the American Dream, gangsters, bootleggers, etc. I loved Gatsby’s dream and admired that he did it all for love, even if it was a terrible reason. The fact remains that if we connect with our students and find out their interests we can give them books that they can enjoy that just might spark a light when it comes to reading. 

I do and don’t agree with this idea of flogging a book to death. I agree that we as teachers overanalyze books and take every little detail and make it into a lesson. This makes students resistant to read on their own because they believe that reading is to break it all down. I don’t agree on the aspect that if we don’t teach students to look at certain aspects of book and find the themes or the figurative language that authors use, then we are setting our students up to just read words. I am that way. I have trouble finding the themes or seeing a piece of literature and being able to analyze every aspect of it. We have to find the right balance of analyzing without tearing the book into shreds. 

TPA

General Reactions to TPA lesson plan:

Now that I am in my second quarter of the Education program, I have mixed feeling concerning the ed TPA. First of all why does lesson planning have to be so in depth and every second of your lesson plan to be planned out. I understand that for new teachers we have no idea what we are doing and it makes our lessons run move smoothly, but to do one lesson plan is so much work. It takes me a full day to sit down and really concentrate on my TPAs. I have to constantly take breaks because it is so mentally draining. New teachers are getting worn down by the constant work they are doing in just lesson planning. 

What in here seems valuable/worthwhile?

The part that I always find useful in the TPA is the assessment part. Figuring out in advance how you are assessing students learning is very crucial. You can’t wait until the last minute to decide how it will occur, the assessment is the center of your lessons. Also the part about differentiated instruction is important because not all students learn the same and some of them have special needs that need to be addressed. You have to distinguish how all your students will learn and how will you help those that need the extra help. 

What questions and concerns to you have about the TPA lesson plan?

The only concerns I have that it is always changing. Every time I look at the template there is something new. Once I am out of college, I will be forced to self teach the new lesson plan to me. This makes it hard to keep up and eventually I will give up on it all together because nothing will be the same as when I learned it. Already I am seeing some changes in the format and I am worried about the future of the TPA lesson plan. 

Useful exercise for beginning teachers

As I have already stated, this TPA lesson plan really gets new teachers to think in depth about their lesson plans. It gets you to look at ALL aspects of teaching and what your main goal is. Another useful thing about the TPA is that it is structured and keeps new teachers focus on what the lesson plan is. 

Problematic about the format?

The part about teacher involvement is always problematic only because it is so hard to find mature ways of telling the parents what is going on in class. Majority of schools have a grade book online that parents can always check. However, that doesn’t give parents a good idea on what the class is really doing. It’s silly to have parents sign off on students homework, we are trying to get them to be responsible for themselves. New teachers struggle to find ways to get parents involved and aware of what is being taught in their classrooms. 

I Read It, But I Don't Get It

Chris Tovani’s book I Read It, But I Don’t Get It” has shown me the light on how to get some of my students who are struggling with being able to comprehend a book. This book could not have entered my life at a better moment. In my freshmen English classes we are reading To Kill a Mockingbird. The test scores are sad to see. I begin to wonder while grading them, are my students lazy and not reading the book or are they not understanding what is happening. I have picked up some skills in this book that I am taking with me to my classroom and teaching to see if there is some way that I can improve their test scores. 

Within this book also I recognize some skills and activities that my English teachers have used in my educational years. The House activity that Mrs. Tovani used in her classroom is the same activity I was given to do when I was in high school. I remember vividly at looking at different points of views and perspective and highlighting certain information. However, that connection between reading and how to set purpose never clicked because my high school teacher never made that connection known. I was alway under the impression that it was just an activity we were doing. 

There is a question that I have about comprehending reading that was bugging me the whole time as I was reading. Is using background knowledge and experience the only way to get kids to comprehend their reading? Every chapter of this book had something more or less to do with this idea of using background knowledge. After a while it was repetitive and my eyes began to skim over that information because I felt like I had heard it a million times already. I understand it’s significance, and that it is very beneficial to the learning of how to really read. I just feel like there has to be another way for those privileged kinds who haven’t had enough experience  with hardship and lack street skills. 

One activity that I found that would be so much fun and beneficial to a classroom was the book sharing. I love the idea of allowing kids to go back and remember a book that had a lasting impression on them. It’s like going back in time and finding that love of reading. I always go back and read certain books over and over again because it made such an impact on me like The Great Gatsby. 

Social Justice in the English Classroom

NCTE (National Council of Teachers of English) held a conference in December 2009 addressing this issue of social justice in the English classroom. They start out by stating that the Declaration of Independence states that we are all equals. We all know that this is completely false because of power, racialism, social class, and gender fairness. Their goal is to have the English classroom differ from the Declaration’s failure and gives tips on how to accomplish this within every English classroom. 

They define social justice into 7 categories:

1. A goal that evades easy definition 
2. A grounded theory
3. A stance/position 
4. A pedagogy   
5. A process 
6. A framework for research  
7. A promise

This website goes into these beliefs more deeply and activities that could benefit us (English teachers) into incorporating into our own classrooms. 

The belief that social justice as a pedagogy is an interesting topic that should be addressed. The first sentence instantly caught my attention. The document states that “Social justice pedagogy presupposes that all students are worthy of human dignity, that all are worthy of the same opportunities in education, that the contract they enter into in schools must honor their sociocultural advantages and disadvantages,that it must seek to offer the same educational, sociocultural , and psycho-emotional opportunities to each student in order to help them meet and obtain a basic threshold that is mutually beneficial to each party who enter in the school space.” Let’s unfold this lengthy sentence. What the NCTE is saying is that we need to treat all o our students equally no matter their background or socio-economic standing. Too many teachers give up on their troubled, or “poor” students because they don’t know how to handle them. I think if we just handles them like HUMAN BEINGS, teachers wouldn’t have such a big problem. We shouldn’t be giving up on the bad students, we should be focusing more of our attention on these students so that they can be equal to the achieving students. 

For example: In my second period classroom at Mead High School, there is a student who comes from a different cultural background and has a hard time grasping the fundamentals on English. Instead of disregarding him as hopeless and giving up on him, I have allowed myself to be there to help him and tutor him to better his English work. We are reading paragraphs allowed to the class, and after I saw how many errors were in his paper I took his out of the pile and returned it to him telling him I would come in early to help him fix his paper. If I would have just left it be, he would have been torn apart by his fellow classmates and he would have probably given up on even trying. We have to put in more effort for those less fortunate and help them catch up with the rest of the class otherwise we are letting our students and ourselves down. 

http://www.ncte.org/cee/positions/socialjustice

The Critical Pedagogy Reader

The Critical Pedagogy Reader addressed some ideas about education that I have never really thought about before. This article goes into a great deal about education and how to the educational researcher, school promotes student empowerment and reproduces dominant class interests. Personally when reading through these articles I just start to think that these people are thinking to far into education. Some of the information that was presented, however, makes sense when you really think about education and how it works. School should be a place that a student finds themselves, learn about how they learn, and how they want to perceive the world around them. Although the kids don’t relies it as they are in school but they are there to make a better life for themselves or at least have parents pushing for a better life. 

One thing I read in this article that I have definitely read before is about the macro learning and micro learning. When reading this part of the article I thought, “Macro sounds like a way better of teaching, why aren’t we just using that.” Then I realized how ridiculous that sounded because Micro is just as important for learning dates and and specific information about events. Even in English we have to teaching information about literature and the information about the time surrounding the literature. But majority of the time we are teaching literature we have to dig deep into making connections with reality and finding themes within the text. 

Another interesting topic I found in this text is the different types of knowledge. To the world there is just knowledge, but this text brings up three different types of knowledge presented in the classroom. Technical which is the science knowledge, practical which s analyzing social situations, and finally emancipatory which is understanding social relations are distorted and manipulated by power and privilege. The last one seemed pretty dark outlook on knowledge. However, all the information within the text was really beneficial to me as a future teacher. We must look at all aspects of education if we are to be apart of it. 

The Most Terrifying Reading Thus Far: "The Pedagogy of the Oppressed"

Freire’s chapter two of “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” is the most depressing reading I have done thus far on the aspect of banking-concept making teachers out to be the “narrators” and “oppressors” of knowledge. Reading this chapter made me furious that someone would put this out making ALL teachers look like control freaks. I agree that some teachers can be seen as dominating know it alls that only want to cram information into their students heads and treat them as if they are incompetent of knowledge. When in fact, teachers are constantly learning from their own students. 

Teachers aren’t cutting off student’s creativity. They are actually pushing students to be more creative and talk about things that they are passionate about. Freire makes teachers look like they are God and students as lowly people. Our goal as educators isn’t to belittle these kids, we are here to push them to the best that they can be. If our only job was to sit in front of them and lecture on and on about our vast knowledge about the world, we would be boring the students. Especially in today’s world, students don’t learn like that anymore. I can see back in the “old days” that this is how teachers taught. Today we have standards and we rely on our students to not only learn from us, but to also learn from their fellow classmates. 

Education has really taken a turn in today’s society. The standards that are in place right now are to use technology and learn from other texts so that they can make up their own responses and perspectives about the world. Our job as educators is to simply guide them so that they are ready for the “real world.” Freire does nothing but stereotype teachers as dictators and emotionless robots just trying to get through the day and oppress students so that they grow up with a pessimistic view of the world and of teachers. 

Response-Based Approach to Reading Literature

Judith A. Langer’s “A Response-Based Approach to Reading Literature” talks about The Center’s mission on how to improve the teaching and learning of literature. The reader-based theory is designed to take the literature that students are reading and give them room to use their own experiences and culture backgrounds to design their own interpretations. What I personally like about this approach is that they understand that there are multiple perspectives and not just one. Looking back on my high school days I only remember there ever being one right answer when it came to interpretations. The Center also relives it takes a couple of reads to fully understand a text and come up with deeper interpretations. The more students experience the more they will interpret. Also with more experience their point of view on an interpretation will change. 

As I was reading this article I came across a topic that I thoroughly enjoy as history minor. With literature students get to live through the history. It is one thing to give students a history background, but by giving them literature they are able to live through history with the characters. They get to read and experience the emotions of those characters. 

Another aspect of this article that I enjoyed from a teacher’s perspective is this idea of having multiple perspectives. This allows students to think openly and conclude their own understandings and perspectives and build upon that without having a teacher tell them their wrong only because they don’t have that in their lesson plans. Teachers need to be more flexible in their lesson plans and allow their students creativity to flow like water. As teachers we need to use our class time effectively, but we also have to allow class time to explore these possibilities instead of reading at home and recounting the information they remember. As a new teacher I tend to give give the information instead of allowing students to think and interpret their own thoughts. Langer tells us that we shouldn’t do that. We need to encourage their own interpretations with mature literary discussions. Discussion is a big part of the response-based approach and with that we must also keep in account how to successfully use discussion within the classroom. 

Common Core State Standards

The Common Core State Standards has created some controversy since it has been introduced. Older teachers wonder if it will even work. They are set in their mind set that this, like all other standards, will fail and disappear within a couple years. It’s hard to disagree with them when they have the background knowledge of state standards and have seen many come and go, but this state standard is different than others that have been introduced. The Common Core State Standards allows teachers to create their own curriculum and teachers don’t feel like they have to only teach to the state test. 

Because of previous standards many students were being held back from exceeding and others were forced to suffer. I have seen first hand during my time in high school that my teachers were not pushing us to further in English Language Arts. It seemed that my teachers were only trying to get the basics across so that we could pass the WASL. Although it was a perfect pace for me, I could tell some of my fellow classmates were bored from either not being challenged or because they were so lost. Also my English class curriculum had no cultural background. In a school where 98% of the school was of white ethnicity. 

As a future teacher I am excited to experience CCSS. It will allow me to bring my own twist to my curriculum and get ideas from other teachers as well. With this system there will be more creative ways to teach materials and students will feed of that creativity and take it with them as they go onto college. I wish CCSS was around when I was a student in the secondary level, maybe then I would have more creativity within my classroom at Mead High School. CCSS are more so guidelines for teacher to reach, it doesn’t matter how they reach this standard but as long as they do their students will prosper.