Chapter Two: Gordon Maynes

“Readicide” by Kelly Gallagher is an easy read and provides some good insights into the area of reading and overall proficiency loss in today’s schools. This chapter posits that because of our students’ lack of exposure to a variety of reading experiences, they are losing capability not only to read but to think. They lack a background of information that might be reasonably expected of an informed, high school educated citizen. So true. A colleague was just pointing out to me that her CP chemistry students were unfamiliar with the word “invert” in the instructions for a lab – sure enough, when mine came to the same point, they had exactly the same reaction: “Dr. Maynes, what does ‘invert’ mean?”.

Highlights of the author’s points:

Students are not aware of global/national/local issues and current events.

Faculties are consumed with adminstrivia instead of substantive discussions
of practical literacy during beginning of the year “planning”.

Emphasis on test scores is smothering time for deep reading.

There are inadequate reading materials in schools and students are limited
in their access to them.

We have reduced or eliminated exposure to “difficult” texts, and do not
teach the reading of them even as we attempt to engage students in more
“light” reading.

SSR does, in fact, increase test scores.

Bringing it home, Ridge View is certainly trying to improve the availability of books, and to give students time for free reading through our SSR program. I wonder if we are going far enough. When your focus in a cash-strapped world is on avoiding the loss of materials, “If you ‘lose’ one, your Department has to pay for it.”, I think this has a chilling effect on our willingness to provide unfettered access to books. Gallagher’s teaching, if we choose to embrace it, is to put out a huge number of books, and encourage, instead of manage, borrowing. After all, if one goes missing, it should be a sign of success – some deprived kid wanted it to read. If it’s ‘missing’ by accident/carelessness within the school, it will come back eventually. Departments have much less funding flexibility than the school when it comes to paying for programs outside the State Standards, and individual teachers lack the infrastructure of a library to monitor borrowing and check-in of materials. I know, I know, we’re lucky to have found funds for the books we have, and we can ill afford to lose them. Could we find an outside, “industrial” sponsor to keep our collection evergreen and growing, and enhance further a very positive initiative?

An area in which I think the author sends mixed messages in this chapter is in talking about the loss of focus on reading of novels, plays and the like, which he says require a structured approach and a competent teacher of English to support, vs. his enthusiasm for recreational reading. These seem to be two different animals, which he treats in an intertwined way. But I happen to agree: if a student has enough experience so s/he is not baffled when exposed to “hard” material – and I would expand this to include technical textbooks as well as classic novels written in language far from the colloquial – he or she will be a more confident reader overall. Do we teach the reading of textbooks? I used to try, but as I had fewer and fewer copies to “waste”, I found myself unable to provide materials which can be marked up and consumed in the quest for process understanding, since this work was focusing on a meta-objective not specifically standards-based. So another potentially good idea from another potentially good bit of teacher PD (“Reading in the Content Area”) bites the dust of inadequate materials support.

“Readicide” by Kelly Gallagher raises many good points relating to our approaches to reading and to instructional priorities in general. Fortunately here at Ridge View we are already actively engaged in improving or remediating many of these situations. As we (hopefully) pull out of the recession and begin to have more discretionary funds, perhaps we can do more.