Readicide

In Readicide, Gallagher talks about how important it is to necessitate the joy of reading when teaching students literature. We absolutely cannot suck the joy out of reading and make it a painful task-focused learning experience. Reading is a lot about discovery as well as it is about letting the author guide your experience of the work; to tamper with that experience (by frequently interrupting for analysis or only quizzing on the book and treating it as a means to a grade) is completely inappropriate and counterintuitive. As teachers we need to give students the opportunity to enjoy reading the book and to read it through without much interruption and refocus onto the assessment of the reading unit.

Gallagher talks about a children’s books author, Mem Fox, and how her daughter Chloe’s love for reading was negatively affected. In her reading class, the teacher would very frequently stop the class to have the students analyze what was happening. While analysis is necessary, the way it was implemented was not beneficial. Gallagher states,  “Chloe’s lament encapsulates what has gone wrong in our schools: the creation of readicide through intensive overanalysis of literature and nonfiction.” It is evident that such practices cause students enjoyment in reading to suffer. Given that literature and nonfiction are meant to read with some amount of passion and enjoyment, it is inappropriate to treat those texts like research papers. These stories so full of life and meaning are meant to capture the reader so it may deliver them to its message, and in this there isn’t room for breaking down on the side of the road every mile.