Readicide

Reading this text, what I found to be interesting was all of the statistics that it gave about students in other states and other countries. The most important part I thought that really stuck with me is when it talked about how schools are taking less time for reading and more time for test preparation. I thought the point Gallagher  made where how administration does not understand the importance of some novels, that they think teachers are only teaching stories. That administration does not all of the important aspects of reading different books to discover theme and to develop stronger reading skills. The other part that I found to be very true because I can relate to this, but that the over teaching of academic text is ruining students from wanting to be lifelong readers. I liked how it pointed out where having students constantly be reading academic text takes the relaxation out of reading. Reading a text and having multiple questions at the end of each chapter that they have to answer to help them with a test just makes everything stressful for students. Lastly, a part that I thought was true was at the end of the book when it discussed how students get confused when reading and do not always comprehend the text. I feel like this is one of the main reasons why students do not like to read. Reading can be difficult for most students and they do not like the struggle that they have to go through just to understand the main idea of the text. The book gave a long list of ideas that teachers can use to help these students, and while reading the list I realized all of the things that I do and not even realize it. I know how helpful these ideas of slowing down to reread, annotating, and making other connections help me so if teachers teach these skills to students then they can become more confident in their reading and develop higher reading skills.