Kelly Gallagher's "Readicide"

          The words written in Kelly Gallagher’s Readicide express some major concerns I have about my future students and my future career as an educator.  Gallagher tackles issues such as the ways our students test and what makes a good test, the learning gap between students, early learners not having acquired the appropriate amount of diction required to get a good start in their education, and students not having proper access to authentic reading tools.  The aforementioned are just a few of the problems which build up to the definition of readicide that Gallagher talks about in his book.

            When I first began to learn about what it means to be a teacher – that is to say when I first began taking classes on being an educator – I had made up my mind about multiple choice questions and how we place too much emphasis on “teaching to the test.”  I was under the impression that to teach to a test standard took students away from authentic learning and reading and pushed students down the path of reluctant reading.  While I still hold onto this belief, Readicide posed an opinion from a teacher’s perspective that questioned my resolve about “teaching to the test.”  It is not about “teaching to the test” or the use of multiple choice questions to assess your student’s learning but rather the challenge comes from teaching to a “shallow” test rather than an authentic test.  The example of the shallow test placed more emphasis on remedial and trivial questions and the various responses teachers gained from their student’s; however, it is possible to create or manufacture multiple response questions with the inevitability of asking the authentic questions and not the mundane.

            In chapter two, in the section “A Danger of Word Poverty,” I had a moment where this particular section hit a little close to home.  Although I am a well-rounded reader today, growing up in a small rural community, known for harvesting wheat and barley, with high school graduating classes comprised of 30 students, surprise to say I was anything but “well-rounded” in terms of my vocabulary.  Today, at the stroke of a key or click of a mouse, students have access to worlds of knowledge and information that in my early education I never even dreamt about.  How then is it possible for todays’ early learners to have this much information and very little access to it?  Poverty and low income houses does have an impact to be certain; however, as educators, is it not part of our job to find ways around these vocabulary blocks and bring our students access to a wellspring of knowledge that comes with being an English language arts teacher?

            Fighting readicide is a difficult task for every English language arts teacher at any level of education.  Promoting healthy and authentic reading is something that we should all impose on our students and it is my goal to provide my students with the best learning I can muster.

Tovani's "I Read It, But I Don't Get It"

          Reading Cris Tovani’s I Read It, But I Don’t Get It has reintroduced learning strategies for both eager and reluctant readers.  Some of the more obvious learning strategies are strategies that I learned while in high school but never mastered until my first year at university.  Talking aloud, marking text, visualizing what you’ve read; all of these reading strategies were something I was familiar with at some point in my academic career but was something I never practiced or took to heart because I was (and to some point still am) a reluctant reader. 

In Part 1, “The Realities of Reading,” Tovani brought up an interesting point to my attention about previously learned methods of reading.  In this situation, Tovani was talking with a teacher candidate who questioned Tovani saying, “[S]houldn’t They Have Learned This in Elementary School?” and followed it up with “[W]hy do I have to teach reading?  Do you realize only eight of my twenty-two students can read the science textbook?”  Whenever a teacher asked me a similar question such as “haven’t you learned this by now?” or “didn’t you learn this last year?”  Such questions made me feel inadequate in class and made me question my own learning up to that point in time.  However, as a future educator, it is my job to understand that sometimes the best way for a student to learn to read or improve their reading skills is to make sure that the text is accessible to everyone and to make sure that each student has the tools needed to understand their reading.

Another problem reluctant readers such as myself have is getting stuck in what I’ve been reading.  The words go in one eye and out the other without retaining any information I just read.  It becomes frustrating – to say the least – when someone, either myself or my student, becomes distant from their reading and instead of trying to provoke some response to their reading their minds just wander off to La-La Land.  In response to this problem reluctant readers have, Tovani’s chapter “Fix It!” provides solutions to these problems.  Rereading the text, questioning what you’ve read, making a prediction to the next chapter, visualizing the world that the text takes place, and even writing a response to the text helps those stunted minds wake up to their reading and assures them that they can get past their literary stopping points.

"Critical Literacy and Popular Culture in Urban Education" Ernest Morrell

          Pop culture holds a heavy influence over how our students are told to think and react in their everyday lives.  As a twenty-something, who is already immersed in pop culture, I am versed enough in pop culture to understand how difficult it is to break away from social media and perform scholastically to the standards that have already been set for me.  From Ernest Morrell’s “Critical Literacy and Popular Culture in Urban Education,” I was able to see how important it is to maintain a connection to my student’s lives by way of their interests and today’s pop culture.  However, there are still shortcomings in trying to effectively apply critical methods when teaching students.

            There is still more to teaching English language arts than by helping them understand how grammar works or by helping them learn new vocabulary.  Every student should be well versed in research methods and being able to dissect what they’ve learned on a fundamental basis of literary standards and showing how to use those methods in every day critical thinking.  Morrell’s attempts to provide his students access to various methods of learning methods; he even goes as far as trying to help educators use these tools and methods in their classroom.  The classroom debate set up was an excellent way of setting up how to both help teachers use these learning activities to help their students and also by using these learning methods help their students achieve common core standards.

            As a future educator, I am with Morrell’s way of thinking: using popular culture and figures relatable to topics of discussion can be used in the classroom to help educate students.  I’ve already had past experience working with children and most kids seem to open up more when you have a basic understanding of their interests and make yourself more relatable to them.  However, a teacher or educator shouldn’t just use pop culture to teach.  As educators, it is our job to continue to pass down literary practices that helps open channels of communication between teachers and students while still maintaining common core state standards.

Paulo Freire’s “Pedagogy of the Oppressed”

          Paulo Freire’s “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” establishes a grand connection between dehumanization and the relationship between oppressors and the oppressed and the teaching methods and philosophies used today.  Future educators such as myself have some experience with either being oppressed or being an oppressor.  I myself identify as a mixed racial, gay male and therefore have fitted into the category of the oppressed for a majority of my life.  Through my own experience and the logic of Paulo Freire’s “Pedagogy of the Oppressed,” I have found an understanding about how the identity of the oppressor is dependent on the existence of the oppressed. 

            The oppressor, if we are to understand is the majority of the populace, is often in control of the systematic ideas that govern the society in which they are inscribed to.  Those who fall outside of the majority – that is to say those without power – and yet are still inscribed into the same society are the oppressed.  In Freire’s understanding, the oppressor “dehumanizes” the existence in the oppressed in order to subjugate them into a structure that they appear as a subspecies and therefore give all power to the oppressor.  The idea of freedom comes from the oppressor and is manifested as fear; a fear of the oppressed realizing the contradictions that exist within their system and taking the form of a revolution.  The fear of freedom gives birth to changes in society that may force the oppressor to recognize injustices that have existed since the establishment of their society.  Freire’s institution makes intuitions about the realities that exist in every society that anchor all members within that society to identify as either the oppressor or the oppressed.

            Each society implements discourses that ensure anyone inscribed to said discourses are bound to follow the social constructs and maintain the social order.  In chapter two, Freire tackles the ideas of his previous chapter discussing the ideas of the oppressed and the oppressor and integrates it to the classroom experience.  Freire identifies that the teacher is the oppressor and the students are the oppressed.  If we are to follow the model that Freire sets up for us, what we are to understand is that teachers “deposit” information into the students’ minds; this model is akin to a bank accounting system of learning.  Students – the “receptacles” of knowledge – are told by the society to obey their oppressors and collect information and retain it as a test to become “humanized.”  What this leads me to believe from Freire’s point of view is that students do not question what they are learning but rather are taught to obey.  If this is true, then the oppressors are not “humanizing” them but keep them “dehumanized” and never reaching their full potential as both students and as human beings.  If we are to fully recognize the students as successful members of society, teachers should really be teaching them to question all things in their classroom: reality. 

            Freire’s “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” has illuminated new ideas about teaching that I had not had before.  Being able to define the relationship between the oppressor and the oppressed as well as how viewing students as “receptacles” dehumanizes them and keeps them in a perpetual state of oppressed are just a few of the ideas that Freire has identified to me in “Pedagogy of the Oppressed.”  Freire’s institution also helped me redefine my own teaching methodology and even refined my teaching philosophy.  If I were to add anything, it would be to pose the question “How do we reinvent the way in which all teachers teach their students?”  How do we help all students in every class reach a new level of meaningful existence?  Perhaps by teaching students to question everything in order to understand the relationship between themselves and our society, future learners can disassemble the established notions imposed by societies that we don’t need to dehumanize or oppress anyone.