This chapter in the book discussed how teachers are committing "readicide" by chopping up great novels and overanalyzing minute details. Several times in this chapter, Gallagher states that "the trivial is often highlighted at the expense of the meaningful" (Gallagher 76). The problem is that with students stopping, sometimes as often as every page, to jot down a big idea, new vocabulary, key character development, or perform some other literary analysis, they are not able to achieve what is referred to as reading flow. While all of these practices do help prepare students for standardized tests, they do not help build life-long readers. Students are becoming turned off to reading as a whole, because they are grouping it with massive amounts of post-it notes and highlighting. They don't get to just read these classic books for their inherit beauty, therefore, students are not able to fully appreciate these masterpieces.
It is interesting that this chapter was assigned to me, as a math teacher, since I don't know a single math teacher who has ever taken a novel, or any other piece of literature for that matter, and analyzed it for tone, theme, character relationships, plot sequence and so forth. However, I can relate to the idea that we are sometimes sacrficing the education of our students in order to achieve high test scores. In mathematics, for example, we are slowly chipping away at the time we spend on teaching students to think critically and replacing it with time spent teaching surface skills and strategies that prove more beneficial during high stakes testing. I guess the standardized test makers haven't yet come up with an efficient way to test critical thinking skills, therefore, it is being neglected in a lot of mathematics classrooms for the sake of time.
Overall, Gallagher made some good points, but I felt that the entire chapter was rather repetitive, as she continued to state the same opinions in different ways throughout the text.
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