Chapter 2-Lilla Marton

After reading I took a few minutes and asked my students questions in regards to the ideas presented in this chapter. They responded much like I expected. "I hate to read", "I got better things to do" and "The books here are wack".

This chapter attempts to convince us that providing interesting and relevant books will encourage our students to explore and recapture their love and need for reading. Although I agree with the idea of this book and this chapter, the sad truth I cannot ignore is that by high school, its too late.

Our students are handed down to us with pre set experiences towards literacy. If they come to us with a strict disgust towards reading, in one semester we cannot change that. If we seriously want to attack this problem then all teachers, all schools and all levels across the board need to pull together and put an emphasis on reading and comprehension. The problem is, we do not have time or materials to do so.

In this chapter Gallagher talks about the "Word Poverty" which is exactly the reason true readers are far and few in our schools. Providing students with the most interesting books will not encourage those, who in the 11th grade, cannot read beyond a 5th grade level. Our students have access to the library which contains books far beyond anything that I thought would be allowed in high school. We have SSR crates with a variety of entertaining and interesting books with topics all students can relate to. Yet, our students would rather play angry birds on their phones or tweet during SSR than read an interesting book. It is sad and unfortunate, but I believe that providing interesting material is far from the solution in changing the culture of our schools and our students reading abilities. Things need to change at school, in their homes and in the culture of our country as a whole.

Our reality is testing. It is what we work for, what keeps us employed and how our teaching "abilities" are evaluated. It is also a waste of time and money. In the chapter he speaks of the students scores in Wyoming being much higher simply because they knew what a "Farrier" was. These students were automatically termed "smarter". This is sad, but it is what happens every year when our students are tested to prove their "intelligence".

Reading and vocabulary are critical for any subject and any test. Interesting materials could potentially encourage students to read, but many students never will. They have access to information all day every day right in the palm of their hands yet they won't even read the news or world events on their cell phones. There is a much larger problem here and providing interesting books simply will not fix it.