Readicide

Kelly Gallagher, with his book Readicide points out that the act of reading in classroom instruction is slowly yet surely finding its way, as its title implies, among the extinct, like the dodo or Tasmanian devil. Gallagher shows that reading is no longer as stressed as it once was in the classroom, and he thinks our society is suffering for it. I tend to agree. When we use reading as only a practical tool, it pulls the joy and the art from it. When, during World War II, Churchill's advisors suggested cutting funding for the arts, Churchill said, "Then what the hell are we fighting for?" Literature is an art. Poetry is an art. Art exists to help us explore our existence and create our own meanings for existence. If we undermine reading as a pleasurable activity, we're only doing ourselves a disservice.

In my placement classroom, we operate with Springboard curriculum. My mentor teacher commonly remarks that she doesn't like how Springboard has gutted literature, leaving us with a literary skeleton crew with which to man the ship of our students' learning. Most of the students in our classroom read only because they're supposed to. They read the bare minimum to maintain the illusion that they are trying, and otherwise ignore their literature. Some students, namely in the accelerated programs, avidly consume books with a ravenous hunger. And they'll be fine. The rest, though, they represent our society's relationship with reading. As Gallagher cites in his introduction, roughly 27% of all adults didn't read a single book in the last year. While they may be reading news or magazines or Facebook comments, they're not engaging with literature, with the art of human expression in the written word. And it's a shame.

I think the best way to counter this steep decline of pleasure reading is to become knowledgeable about literature. To know and understand a wide variety of novels and books gives us the means to help students pursue their interests while simultaneously and surreptitiously giving them the chops to become better readers. Standardized testing is a big beast, and it will take more than one knight in shining armor to bring it down. Until such a monster withers away, we must learn to move around it and fill the gaps it leaves behind ourselves.