Reading is Fun… I Promise.

              Gallagher Defines readicide as “the systematic killing of the love of reading, often exacerbated by the insane, mind-numbing practices found in schools.” I think that this is something that is close to home for a lot of English majors. We LOVE reading but why do we love reading so much and so many others don’t? Or is that the wrong question completely? Do we actually love reading as much as we say we do or is it just something we have always been good at and decided to roll with it? It is hard to image that out of all of the students that are pushed through the education system that only a few walk out loving books as much as we do, or enough to pursue an entire degree based on the study of them. There has to be a determining factor in our lives that led us to love books as much as we claim to, that may have been a teacher, it may have been the material we read, or it may have been the way the teacher taught literature to us. According to Gallagher’s Readicide it was actually all of those things that worked together to create a love of literature that our students no longer have or are not going to have. Teachers, administrators, and our nation have all been focusing more on the improvement of test scores. This movement of focusing more on the test score it forcing students to experience “academic reading as their only source of reading.” Students are becoming less likely to read for fun or enjoyment because they have been taught to read for a purpose for so long. The “overemphasis of teaching reading through the lens of preparing students for state-mandated reading test has become so unbalanced” that students are leaving high school being able to read, without understanding, or they are able to read and then choose not to read if they don’t have to. Students are no longer reading for enjoyment, they don’t read for fun, pleasure or for the purpose of better understanding the world around them. This is causing peoples vocabularies to shrink, and a rising problem of people not understanding the current world issues, much like the example that Gallagher wrote about when he was talking with students in his class and a few girls that were reading a text had no idea what Al Qaeda was, in fact they thought it was a man, they thought that Al, was a real individual man rather than the terrorist organization that it is. He points out that this is caused from students not reading enough on their own, the only time students are reading is in the class, and most of the time that is not a full-length article, or a full-length book it is a snip-it of something that is only relevant to the teacher’s lessons. So even when students are reading in classes other than English it may only be a few pages of information relevant to the topic, rather than a full-length piece that students can formulate their own opinions on and think about critically outside of the scope of their classrooms.  

              With the rise of social media’s, the purpose of reading is suffering even more than it has in the past. Students are finding it harder and harder to connect to literature because they can’t connect to it the way that they can connect to Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter or any other major social media site. Students are becoming so use to the sensation of instant gratification that when they are reading they find it slow and mundane, because well… it is. Reading is not something that is easy, it has to be taught, and in order for people to enjoy it, it needs to be taught well. Being able to read is a huge privilege that I don’t think many students appreciate anymore. For so many years people could not read because it was an elitist thing to do, only those that were educated could read, it was a privilege not a right. People have not always had the right to know how to read or write. It is important that we continue to teach literacy to our students, but with finding new ways to make it creative and fun so that we can create life long readers rather than readers that stop after they graduate high school or college. I currently work at an elementary school, and so many of my littler kids that are either in kindergarten or first grade are so excited about reading because they haven’t learned it yet, some of them even pretend to know how to read because they see the older kids doing it, and they think it is cool. Then, I see my 4^th and 5^th graders that still read but with less vigor and enthusiasm than my younger kids and I wonder, where was their excitement lost, how old were they when they realized that reading outside of class wasn’t fun anymore? Even at the elementary level students are realizing that they don’t want to read outside of class because their book is most likely a movie, and they would rather watch that. Reading is a transitive experience that when given the opportunity can be the most exciting and thrilling experience for anyone, at any age.  

              There are sections in every chapter where Gallagher tells you how to prevent readicide. This is going to be really helpful as a teacher because lets be real, we love English so much that we are going to want to assign more of it than we probably should, or maybe we wont know how to assign reading that will entice students to read on their own, because the last thing that we want to do as English teachers is hinder students ability to read, or worse, damage their experience with reading so drastically that they cease to read altogether. Gallagher recommends providing students with authentic reading experiences, allowing them to read on their own, at their own pace, reading things they might enjoy, rather than cultivating such a strict environment for reading giving students the creative freedom to explore their own literary interests will allow them to feel more invested in their experience. The last topic that I want to touch on is a point that Gallagher made in his book about there being a huge difference between assigning reading, and teaching reading. When teachers assign reading they are taking the experience out of their hands and thrusting it on the students, forcing them to do it on their own, or not. There is no accountability for the students and really there isn’t any for the teacher either, so how will anything be accomplished? When you are teaching reading, you are choosing to interact with the material, and the students making it a shared experience for everyone that surrounds the literature. When more time is taken to teach, not along side the literature, but from within the literature, through the literature both the teacher, and the students are going to have a better experience and readicide will always be prevented when taught from a intentional, and caring perspective.