Chapter 5: Ending Readicide

This last chapter in Readicide highlights some very important issues. One statement that stood out to me was about the rising test scores but how the state lowers standards to meet law's demands. It is very saddening to know that we as a nation and as educators have to compromise with law's demands to help meet test scores. I hope that by me saying this is not contradictory to how I really feel, but how is that out of all the years education has been around that no one has developed a better solution to help our children. I mean honestly, I strongly believe that there should be more accomodations or variations made for low achieving students when it comes to taking standarized test instead of the solution we have now. Just think about it, how many low achieving students do we have compared to our average learning students. Also, is it considered fair to those students to actually be tested on something that is below their standards or actual abilty. This leads to the next topic in the chapter, "are we fixing the wrong things?". In my opinion yes, we are fixing the wrong things. For one, these kids who actually want to attend these great colleges are being deprived of information that is essential to survival in college. Although there are some kids who may not feel that it is important there are some who want to learn. The book also mentions how we as the United States are teaching our kids to become creative thinkers and think outside the box. All of that is fine except not everybody has that ability. There are students who survived upper level college courses, grad courses, as well as professional level courses due to being able to think creatively. Is it wrong that they have this ability? Absolutely Not! If a student is able to express and explain the information in an ability that we as educators can understand than by all means, but what about the kids who aren't as creative in thinking, and need to know everything about a particular subject in order to retain the information. Toward the end of the chapter the book mentions how the country finland scored higher on standarized testing and how we can't really compare ourselves to them. Well have we ever thought about adopting some of the strategies etc from other companies. I believe we Americans live in a country that does enough to get by and it is becoming more and more contagious which is why one of the main issues we have is with our children losing the love for reading.

Readicide Chapter 4 ppgs. 99-109

In Chapter 4 of Readicide Gallagher discusses various ways of breaking down text for better understanding. One of the ways he mentions is by breaking the reading up into parts that way the students won’t be so overwhelmed when it comes to reading the difficult and very long text. Another way, which seems very simplistic and common, but at the same time surprised me was the idea of providing topics and or themes to students during the reading. Providing topics for students not only helps the child become more aware of what the text is about, but allows them to search for context clues within the text that further enhances understanding of the reading. I truly believe that this method is one of many that have been very successful. Providing topics and or themes does in fact allow the student to be able to read complex material and gather information about it that is needed. This teaching strategy can also be used in other forms of literacy such as communication. When it comes to communicating, especially in foreign languages, I find it interesting that if given topics, I am capable of singling out the context clues within the sentence and forming a better understanding of what the person is trying to say. For example, in Spanish class, when we first begin to learn the language, our teacher would say various statements in Spanish although we had no clue what each meant. However, as the class progressed, and we became more familiar with certain vocabulary, our teacher begins to speak even more in Spanish. Here intentions were to get us to understand the context clues and be able to determine what the sentence meant.

Readicide Chapter 3

Chapter three in Readicide was very interesting to me. It talks about how the over-analyzation of teachers can be one of the main causes. Who would have ever thought that a teacher reading a story to the children and then decides to ask questions coud be a cause of why students lose interest in reading. This idea or thought could very well be true for the students in elementary school. However, for those students in middle school and high school definitely lose interst due to the text being boring, laziness, and ways to find shortcuts. I noticed that the author also mentioned how one page papers (REFLECTION BASED) were good ways to keep the interest of readers. I find that to be very true due to the fact that each student is capable of expressing how they feel. It also allows the child read deep into the text and gather a better understanding. It assures them that their is no right or wrong answer and builds their confidence in expressing their opinions.

Vocabulary

After reading over the text as well as the articles this past week there were a few matters that concerned me due to personal experiences. The text mentions that students acquire word knowledge from the wide reading they do and from teaching read alouds and shared readings. I find it hard to believe that one of the main styles of learning vocabulary was failed to be listed. This particular learning style is through conversation. It is very well true that students acquire word knowledge through readings etc, but what happens when the student accomplishes the reading material by completing the text, but according to standarized test the child's vocabulary level is extremely low. So, is it really true that students learn through these styles of teaching or is it really through conversation. As a child, I was one who loved to read and understood what I was reading, however when it came to standarized testing my vocabulary level was very low. As years passed by I became less interested in reading and was not required to use any of the vocabulary words that were learned at school and through text. Recently, I have acquired a range of vocabulary through general conversations with friends and professionals. We all are familiar with the line "use it or lose it", which is true. How do you really teach a child vocabulary words, is it just learning the definition and being able to apply it to a test question? Or is it so that the child maybe able to use the word over and over again years later when they are apply for a job or teach another child vocabulary.