#3 response to readicide

Overall, I think Readicide lived up to its name and won me over as an interesting read considering it's anti-reading content. After I'd finished it I realized the book gave voice to some of the same troubling literacy issues I've noticed during my time as a student teacher, and Gallagher's suggestions for correcting said issues were insightful. He writes from a very opinionated, somewhat sardonic point of view---he believes he's right about the decline of reading in public schools, and the passion evident in his prose is persuasive.

I found one passage particularly interesting. Gallagher is dismayed when his students aren't familiar at all with a majority of the real-world issues described in an issue of Newsweek. He decides to order his class a weekly subscription (after an extensive search for funding), and asks his students to, among other things, decide "which article in the magazine is least newsworthy," and to "pick three articles and rewrite their headlines." This kind of hands-on manipulation of the news would seemingly immerse the student in the subject matter, and the creativity called for would certainly stimulate a rush of critical thinking, which I believe is vital to a well rounded public education.

This led me to employ my own version of this literacy engagement technique. Instead of Newsweek, I stole copies of the new york times from GCSU campus and brought them to my students at Baldwin High School. Considering our unit in AP US Government dealt specifically with the media's impact on American's political culture. I felt that this type of media dissection would prove invaluable to assessing my student's understanding of the conceptual content discussed throughout the unit. Each student was challenged to find an article that showed a potential cleavage in public opinion, or in other words, an article that would highlight difference and diversity among social class, or race, or religion, or region. The students would list the facts of the article and the feelings the article invoked. Feelings such as bias in the authors point of view, groups of people who would be offended or pleased by the article, and the students own opinion of the validity of the article. Overall, this literacy engagement proved very challenging to my students, yet also led to an interesting class discussion over which articles in a mainstream newspaper directly related to the issues covered in class. It seemed to connect real world events into the theoretical concepts that would have easily drifted over their sleeping 15 year old heads. Thank you, Mr. Gallagher, for the tip.