Readicide

A lot of what Kelly Gallagher was saying in Readicide really struck close to what is currently going on within my district. Deer Park is going through a lot of SBAC preparation with their students, so that is basically all the English Department has been preparing for. We are making a lot of students read informational text over and over and drilling them with continuous note taking strategies and response development. It has become so bad that the moment I tell students we will be doing circle charts their is an audible grown heard around the room. I am sure the English department is committing Readicide with their students and that the students a growing a hatred for reading. We definitely aren't making "expert citizens" a concept I really liked on page 13. I find it really hard to teach students like this. They immediately become disinterested in the articles I give them and no matter what I seem to do to try to make it exciting the either 1. don't do the work or 2. go through the motion and don't synthesize anything they are reading. We have also phased out a lot of our literature instruction, which is something much easier to get the students into reading. Although many claim to hate reading literature they often enjoy the stories we read and are way more engaged when it comes to these texts. We were about to begin moving into a new novel, but students are not doing SBAC prep and we have to either push our novels back or completely remove them. My master teacher was going to allow me to teach the unit of Of Mice and Men (Steinbeck is my favorite American author),  and let me know a few days ago it may have to be cut for test prep. I understood, but was sad I'd miss the opportunity to teach one of my favorite authors to my students. This brings me to my final point on Readicide. The practice of teaching to the test, or test prep, not only negatively effects students, but also negatively effects good teachers. A lot of the passion we had coming into the subject gets taken away for test prep, which we can be passionate for for our students, but it often feels false or disingenuous. A lot of our love for reading and literature gets pushed out for writing and preparing for tests day to day to try to make some higher power happy, meanwhile students are frustrated, disengaged, and left behind. Students that display these struggles make us as teachers feel like we are not doing our job correctly leading people like me to be less confident in my instruction, lesson planning, and student interaction. In short, a student that passes a state test frustrated, annoyed, and hating English, is less valuable to me than a student who fails that same test, but loves reading and writing and comes from an environment where they want to work on those skills to improve and do better next time.