Gallagher's Readicide Response

Kelly Gallagher’s Readicide is just another reason why I continue to put Gallagher books into my wish-list for Amazon books. Readicide really opened my eyes to reading in the high school and broke down my original assumptions about reading that is assigned to students. My original assessment of the reading problem in high schools, based solely on my observations, is that students who didn’t read well or lacked reading skills did so because reading wasn’t valued in their household, or that students had a pre-disposition against reading. Now, after reading this book, I have come to realize just how true and depressing the “readicide” is in American schools.

My largest take-a-way from this book, and the main reason I will re-read this when I am in the field, is found in chapter 4 when Gallagher gives examples as to how teachers can make reading more accessible to students. When I was in school, I hated reading. Only after reading The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown, which is a very fast paced book, did I realize how much I loved to read. Many students I will encounter have never had a “Da Vinci” moment like I had in school. The techniques that Gallagher presents, such as the big-chunk little-chunk or guided book tours, are reading strategies that I know I will employ in my classroom when I am a teacher.

One of the only problems I had with this book is that Gallagher doesn’t get to the “meat” of the solution until the very end of the book. The first three chapters were arguments for the existence of “readicide” and how it manifests itself in the classroom, without much guidance in how to change it. I think that this book is meant for those people who are already in the field of ELA and are skeptical about “readicide” in schools. This book is very educational for a preservice teacher like myself, but would be much more powerful for current teachers to read.

Like any other Gallagher book I have read for other classes, I found many other titles of books I want to read. While I read the book, I kept a running list of books Gallagher mentions in Readicide being worthwhile reads for teachers of ELA. I ended with 6 new books that I will buy and read in the future, to make sure that I am a well-rounded English teacher. I found this book very helpful and I will keep this one on my shelf next to all my other books to be referenced later on down the road when I am teaching in a classroom.